About
Hi, I’m Eli.
I run my own businesses, I race cars, I’m engaged, and I’ve got way too many hobbies. For most of my life, that meant a to-do list that grew faster than I could work through it.
This is the story of how I fixed that, one board at a time, over ten years. None of it happened overnight, and that’s kind of the whole point.
100 things and no idea where to start.
Back in 2016 I kept a running to-do list in the notes app on my phone. New things went on top, and I checked them off from the bottom up whenever I could. No limit, no order, big tasks and tiny ones all mixed together.
Five weeks in, I had almost 100 things on that list and had done maybe 70. The little stuff always got done. The big stuff, like my taxes, just kept getting skipped. Every morning I woke up to 30 giant things and no idea which one to tackle first. I wasn’t lazy. I was buried.
One board at a time.
- 2016, the Day. I found Ivy Lee’s six-item list from 1918. Six things, ranked, done in order. I ran it alone for three months before I added anything.
- 2019, the Week. My days were working, but big projects still stalled. I started doing Ben Franklin’s time-blocking schedule which got me time blocking every hour of my week.
- 2021, the Quarter. Every December I’d plan a huge year and hit maybe 30 percent of it. Reading The 12 Week Year rewired that. My first 12-week cycle started January 2022.
- 2023, the Year. Racing schedules kept wrecking plans with my fiancée. Jesse Itzler’s year-at-a-glance calendar fixed it: dates that can’t move go up first, then we plan the good stuff.
I didn’t invent any of this.
Every piece of this system came from someone smarter than me. What I did was run them together for years, cut what didn’t work in real life, and figure out the order that actually sticks.
That order matters more than anything. Every time I tried to do everything at once, I quit within a month. Adding one layer at a time is the only reason any of it lasted.
An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest.
I built OWN Your Life to get you moving, not to give you something else to think about. Your first step takes five minutes tonight: write down the six most important things for tomorrow.