Your to do list is long, and the same few items have moved from one week to the next for months. You keep hunting for a better way to get through them, a new app or a different way of sorting the same jobs. Your not to do list is more important than your to do list, and you have never written one.

I have worked from 35 cities in ten years and everything I own fits in one suitcase. Freedom is my highest value and I optimize everything for it, which makes me conscious of how the things you own can end up owning you. My not to do list has taken years to build and it gets longer every year.

You have to be a bit unreasonable to get where you want to go. All the best people are unreasonable, and what looks like a diva move from outside is somebody who decided a long time ago what they will not spend time on. Here are five of those decisions.

What successful people quit that everyone else keeps doing

No television, no Netflix, no news, no TikTok, no shorts. That is my media diet and it makes people visibly uncomfortable when I describe it, because staying informed is the socially acceptable addiction. The person who reads a stack of newsletters before breakfast gets treated as diligent, and the person who scrolls for an hour and calls it research gets away with it entirely.

If something is important, somebody will tell me. We all already have the answers in there somewhere, and finding them takes a level of silence you cannot get with a podcast playing on every walk. Work out the gap you have, go and get exactly that information, then find the media that matches it. The answer was never in the feed.

Doing the chores themselves

Laundry, cooking, cleaning, shopping. Every one of them is a job somebody will do for an hourly rate a long way below what you charge, and doing them yourself gets called staying grounded. Nobody says the other version, which is that you spent your Sunday on a task you could have bought for the price of one client hour.

I back myself to make more of that time than the money it costs somebody else to do it. That is true even when I am not working. Especially when I am not working, because the hours where I do nothing are the ones that make the working hours any good. Pay somebody to do your chores and stop calling it a luxury.

The coupon code hunt before you check out. The apartment that costs less and is further from the gym. Being savvy with money is a trait people are proud of, they mention it at dinner, and underneath it is scarcity thinking with a respectable job title.

Just buy it. Just pay full price and take the time back. Choose the place near the gym or with the better view, because in a better environment you think bigger and act with more abundance. Expensive can mean better quality. The extra you paid is outweighed by the first decision it improves.

Somebody drops the application form in a group chat. The conference, the award, the thing you have wanted for years. You fill it in properly, you get a rejection or nothing at all, and you file the whole episode under putting yourself out there.

That is not how people get those big opportunities. Organizers are asking their friends, saying who do you know who would be good at this, and that is the list you want to be on. Spend less energy putting yourself forward and more on being the kind of person people want to recommend. Bigger things come and they come faster. None of them started with a form.

Being available to anyone who asks

The free discovery call, the demo for somebody who has decided nothing. You gave the hour because being generous with your time is the part of yourself you like most. I quit people pleasing and I quit chasing clients, and the business grew in the space that opened up.

At Coachvox we do not do sales calls, we do not do demos, and we do not do tech support on free downloads. Start the 14-day free trial and you get all of it, the community and every bit of our attention, because you moved first. Give your best hours to the people who have already shown you they act.

Why successful people quit the things others are proud of

Having a not to do list makes you somebody who looked at how everybody else operates and decided to operate another way, with rules about where their hours go. Add to it every time you notice something is not grooving, or you finish a thing and know you will not do it again. The freedom it creates is in your head, in all the hours you stop spending on decisions you already made.

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