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During the Building Blocks live program in February, I was testing out a new todo app called Todoist — seeing if I could transition to a simpler interface than ClickUp now that my team is smaller.

So I dutifully loaded up my current projects and tasks…

…and started noticing a pattern.

The due dates were useful for things that were actually timely: filing 2025 taxes, paying estimated federal tax, paying State PTE tax, paying sales tax. (Ooof, no more taxes.)

But for my more complex projects? I started getting frustrated with myself for pushing out task due dates.

Membership onboarding journey? Didn’t do that today, I guess we’ll try Friday.

Membership project plan? That’s overdue, let me find the next time.

The Root by Root book revisions? That’s overdue too…

And then I remembered... this is why I don't set due dates for tasks within my bigger projects!

Because of how these tools are designed, they ask you to put in due dates. Which for many tasks is useful: podcast editing that needs to hit a weekly deadline, a response to a client, following up on a sales proposal.

But for what I call Build projects? Where tasks take an undetermined amount of time and depend on your creativity?

I find self-imposed deadlines overly restrictive. Instead, I focus on a different concept: Sequence over deadlines.

When you operate in sequence

We’re terrible at estimating how long things take. We set arbitrary deadlines, then try to cram all of them into a capacity that’s too small. How else will we get it all done right now?

When we operate with fixed deadlines we can’t hit, two things happen. First, shame. We measure ourselves against an invisible standard we set while feeling the pressure of speed and conclude the problem is us: I’m just not moving fast enough.

Which leads directly to the second peril: we re-plan. We spend as much time reorganizing our priorities as we do executing them. We lose precious time to decision fatigue — having to repeatedly decide when and whether to pick back up the work we had to move.

Instead of holding to deadlines, we hold to a sequence of commitments.

The next right moves rarely change. When you think in sequence, instead of committing to a deadline, you commit to an order. One project after another. You stay with that work until it’s done, and then move to the next. No thrashing, no re-planning, no shame at missing deadlines, and no energy lost to wondering what comes next. Only executing in order, evaluating the sequence at each reflection cycle.

My current sequence

I have three interconnected BIG build projects right now:

1. Overhauling the Foundations Membership — updating onboarding, programming, and space organization to match the rhythms we’ve embedded over almost two years. Member survey, member interviews, the works.
2. Formalizing my Five Foundations framework into a map and handbook — tying together Relationship Rhythms, Building Blocks, Business Models, and more.
3. Writing my next book (also tied into the Five Foundations framework).

Plus two “small” projects: prepping for Relationship Rhythms live experience (mid-May — mark your calendars) and turning Building Blocks into an evergreen summit asset.

(P.S. — I work a full 40 hours a week on my business, with about 8 hours dedicated to these projects, which is why I can take this many on at once.)

All of these are intertwined: the Membership onboarding will be informed by the Five Foundations framework, which means I need to do the Map and handbook work in tandem.

So when I sit down to do the “tasks” from my task manager… sometimes the tasks aren’t clean and I didn’t get the task-level order right. Last Friday, instead of working on the Membership Onboarding journey, I built out slides for the Five Foundations Framework. This week, instead of the handbook, I finished the Member Survey questions.

When I try to hit deadlines? I feel guilty for working out of order. If I don’t get to something Thursday when I said I would, I feel bad about it.

When I work in sequence? I know the big 2-3 projects I’m working on and the underlying components. When I sit down for Build time, I decide what next step on this limited list is calling my attention. Everything else that looks interesting gets parked in an undated ideas list.

If I don’t finish what I was working on? I keep plugging away in my next block of time.

If something urgent pops up (like yesterday during book time)? I don’t re-plan. I don’t spend time shifting deadlines in my task manager. I just know where I left off and where to pick it back up.

I know the big 2–3 projects I’m working on. I know what’s included, what steps I need to hit, and roughly when they can launch.

I’ve stopped worrying about whether I’m moving fast enough—at least by arbitrary deadlines.

I care more about whether I’m working in the right order.

Because when I feel behind, it’s rarely about pace. It’s that I’m trying to hold too many things at once.

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Is your inner child running your business with Nicole Lewis-Keeber In this episode, we talk with Nicole Lewis-Keeber, MSW, licensed clinical social worker, ICF-credentialed coach, and certified Dare to Lead facilitator, about how childhood trauma and nervous system responses show up in the way we run our businesses. Nicole spent 18 years as a therapist before launching her own business 12 years ago, and she’s been carving out space for this conversation ever since — even when therapists told her she couldn’t talk about trauma outside the therapy room and coaches told her to stop using the word entirely. We get into how our inner children influence everything from sales to visibility to pricing, why urgency is usually a trauma response, and what it looks like to pause and figure out who’s actually making the decisions in your business. Listen to the Pod