THA S02 EP#16 - Your Blueprint shouldn’t be a Task List

Most people confuse task management with life design. By mid-February, most New Year resolutions have failed. Not because people lack discipline, but because they built habits on the wrong foundation.

In this solo episode, host Michael Cupps explains the difference between a task list and a values-based blueprint. Drawing from the Time Bandit priority management methodology, he demonstrates how to anchor daily habits to core values that create lasting change, not borrowed priorities from social media or workplace pressure.

Michael addresses why New Year resolutions fail at high rates and what system replaces them, how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to separate urgent tasks from important priorities, what distinguishes motion from meaningful progress, how to break bad habits by redesigning your environment instead of relying on willpower, and why common values like health, wealth, and family often fail as behavioral anchors.

This episode provides frameworks for college students resetting routines for spring semester, professionals reclaiming time from meeting overload, leaders aligning teams around shared purpose, and anyone building sustainable habits without burnout.

This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io

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Chapters

• 0:26 The Blueprint Your Life is Missing
• 3:25 Why February 16th is When Most Resolutions
• 6:27 Building Habits That Support Your Blueprint
• 7:44 Breaking Bad Habits by Making Them Harder
• 9:25 The Eisenhower Matrix: What to Do First (and What to Ignore)

Transcript

Michael Cupps: 0:25

Hello, this is Michael Cups with the Habit Architect. Uh, today I'm gonna be coming to you solo. I don't have a guest this week. We're coming off the Thanksgiving break. Uh, we've got a busy couple of weeks coming ahead with great guests, but uh, this week it's just me and I'll keep it short. But I do wanna talk about, uh, something I, over the weekend I yet to spend some time with my son. He is working, he's a foreman of a, of a job to build an early childhood development center in, uh, northwest of Fort Worth. And I was, we were looking at his blueprints that, uh, are, uh, are there for the job ahead of him. And it struck me that a lot of times in this time of the year, this season, the holiday season, whatever it is you celebrate, uh, and especially when we turn the calendar over to January. People begin to think about resolutions, what they didn't get done in the, in the year 2025, what they wanna get done in 2026, how they want to be, what type of person they want to be. Did they accomplish those goals or did they not? Uh, there's a varying degree of, of. Um, things that have occurred, you know, maybe there was a, a, a student, a a child of yours, uh, started a new journey in college and they, they've gone through their first semester and it either met expectations, it didn't meet the expectations, or they certainly probably feel like they could do better. And all of those things are natural. They're natural feelings. That's the way it works for people, you know? And sometimes we build these habits around ourselves that may not seem difficult or problematic at the time, but as time as, as we go through over time, they may lead us down abrupt path that we don't wanna be on. And. It could be as simple as our weight. It could be, uh, as, as dramatic as you're doing something that may cause cancer or may cause other types of, uh, ill feelings in with you or with somebody else. So all of these things are, are within our grasp. Our days get busy, our weeks get even more hectic. There's things that we have to do, and all of these things become either the habits that we take on or the tasks that we take on, and those tasks end up getting this to be a list somewhere. It could keep it on your laptop, you could keep it in. A piece of paper, you may put it in the time banded app, whatever, whatever it is that you do to keep those tasks and habits, uh, oriented so it becomes top of mind and you do that. The problem with task lists, the problem with things of, that we have to do today or have to do tomorrow, is they become these independent structures of how we behave. That in and of itself isn't the bad part, but does it align with our overall values of what we wanna be? And so when I mentioned, I started this, uh, conversation saying that my son had these blueprints laid out, and I was thinking about that as a way of life, uh, that a blueprint is not necessarily the map of how you get there, but it's the map of how all these things interconnect and to become what it could be. In that case in early Childhood Development Center. So. We all need to be thinking about our blueprint and as we are thinking about moving from 25 to 26, the things that we wanna do, the resolutions we want to take, uh, one thing that I see is. As a lot of failures and, and usually the timeframe varies, but it's around somewhere around February 16th is when most resolutions stop. Uh, why is that? Well, the primary reason is there probably just a thing we want to do. Maybe it was a fad, maybe it was, uh, somebody told us on a TikTok that we should do a, a cold plunge every morning, or maybe it's wake up at,

at 5: 3:43

00 AM every morning, so you'll be more productive for the day. That may or may not suit your purpose and what you need to do, but because it's a fad, everybody thinks we should do it. I think the one that's going around now, and it may be good, maybe bad, I don't know, is the weighted vest for walking. I'm just as happy getting out for a walk because it covers off several things for me. One movement and two meditation. I can think, uh, should a weighted vest be a part of it? I don't know. I haven't really looked into it. I haven't researched because right now that serves me as walking with my dog and thinking and uh, getting the exercise. But it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that we're not influenced by other things in other people and other time that's put on us. So how do we do, how do we build our blueprint for ourselves? Well, the first thing we have to do is understand what it is our purpose is. What is our values? And I'm not just talking about, you know, health, wealth, and family. I, that's, those are all good verbs, or I'm sorry, good nouns. Uh, but are they really actionable? Because everybody would say the same thing just about when you talk about. Your values. So what I urge you to do and, and, and time banded is, is about this. And there's a training course out there that can walk you through that. And I'll tell you about a special on that training course in just a moment. But when you go through a hierarchy of values exercise, the first thing you do is identify those things, health, wealth, and family, let's say. Then what you wanna do is think about why those are important. Why is health important to you? Not because somebody told you you need to be healthy. Not because you know you're trying to be healthy because you read magazines and you wanna look good or whatever. But what is it about health that is. Purposeful for you. Why do you wanna be healthy? That could be that you wanna live longer. It could be that you want to be able to spend better quality time with your family, hiking, whatever it may be, associate that value with a purpose. And if you can associate that purpose and that purpose is meaningful, it becomes part of your blueprint. And after you make it, make it part of your blueprint. Now. Expand that out. You can use chat, GPT or any ai, or just write it out. You know, how are you gonna live your life to support that blueprint? What is it that you are going to do in, in the scenario I used earlier, what are all the workers gonna do to actually make that blueprint come to life? That's why I want you to think about your values. What is it that you're gonna do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that is going to instantiate that purpose? Into who you are. So the hierarchy of values exercise is really a, is part of the the thinking about how you want to construct your, your life. Then comes the tasks and habits, absolutely. There's gonna be tasks and habits and they come at you very fast and you'll come off a holiday being somewhat relaxed maybe. Maybe depending on your family. And when you come out of that holiday, you're ready to tackle the new year. If you don't have that blueprint, it's gonna be very difficult for you to stay on course. But even when you have that blueprint, what happens is life and life happens. They throw more tasks at you. Your boss comes and throws more work on you. Maybe you're starting a new business, maybe you already own a small business, and you know that any little thing can trip you up on that you're distracted on. So when you. Your values, you can actually ground your habits, make sure your habits, helping you live that blueprint. I mean, what I mean by that is habits that don't serve that blueprint, you find a way to break 'em. And we have some great tools, uh, on breaking and building habits that I would encourage you to download from our website. Or if you go through the training, you'll get all those downloads with you. The point is the habits that you seek are the ones that support your blueprint. So how do you build those habits into your day? Well, you primarily do that through that value, purpose that we talked about. So if health is important to you, then maybe walking in the morning or walking in the evening is part of that. Maybe it's working out, whatever it is. You wanna build that habit into that blueprint, and once you do that, you've already locked in the time for that to to do it. Now are you gonna do it every day? Maybe not. Maybe on Thursdays you have a just an excruciating busy day with staff meetings and this and that, and the client meetings, whatever. But you can't get it. But at least you know you have a plan and you're back on it on Friday. If Thursday is just the day you can't do it, that's okay. I'm not saying perfection is the thing here. It's this consistent steps of being consistent that is really the most important thing. So find those habits that support your blueprint. Find a way to build those habits into your timeframe. Make 'em easy. If, if they're, if you're trying to build a new habit, the worst thing you can do is make it a hard thing to accomplish. Make it really easy, make it obvious, and get on with it. If you're trying to break habits, what you're trying to do is make that habit harder. Whatever that habit may be, if it's something that you've been doing every year. Uh, since you remember, then it's really gonna be important for you to make that habit harder. So, obviously easy examples are food. Take the bad food away. So you can't have, you don't have instant access to it, but maybe it's just you want to eat healthier. So stop using DoorDash. Take the app off your phone. That could be making a, making something harder that was doing you harm against your blueprint. So think about your habits that you wanna break, make sure they're difficult to get to the habits that you wanna build, make sure those are easy to accomplish. And then lastly, how do you handle all those tasks that come at you? Well, the, the way that we walk you through that in our training is using the Eisenhower matrix. Now, the Eisenhower Matrix isn't necessarily a task list because you may have tasked in other, other areas, but what I'd urge you to think about the. Eisenhower Matrix and use it daily, and you can use it in the app. Uh, is the reason, is you quickly learn how to focus on what's important and what's urgent. So urgency is something that we sometimes can't control. Our boss tells us they need something, you know, by the end of the day, or your customer says, we need this by next Wednesday, though that urgency is already thrust upon. Now what we can do is talk about importance and then if we start to practice the Eisenhower Matrix where we understand importance and urgency, then we know what to work on first. So the, the whole idea is there's a quadrant. Upper left is do first. Those are the things that are most urgent and most important. And then the things that go in the upper right quadrant. Are for scheduling later. They're very important, but they're just not as urgent as something that, uh, is sitting in your due first category. So those you schedule out. And the nice thing about scheduling something out is it takes it out of your mind space. You don't no longer feel that burden that that's there, you know that that's gonna be something you do next Monday. It's off your plate for now. You don't have to deal with it until Monday. Then the next category is things you can delegate, and I really want everybody to think about things that you think you have to do yourself, but maybe there is something else or somebody else that can do those tasks. And when you can delegate things off your list altogether, then it just frees up space for you to do the do first and the schedule really well. And then the last quadrant is things that are not important and not urgent, and we don't want you doing those at all or. If it's something you wanna do later, just park it for a later time. But it's something that is dragging you down away from your blueprint if you're focused on things that are not important and not urgent, so that I just ran through the time benefit methodology. Um, there's a whole lot more to it. I, I, one thing I will do is because New Year's resolutions are coming up fast holiday season, maybe that college kid is home and they're trying to figure out a way to assist them to, to be better in the spring semester. There's a QR code on this screen. I'd urge you to use that. I'm gonna knock 50% off the standard rate for the bundle. And when you get the training bundle, you also get one year of the mobile app at no additional cost. So you get one year subscription for the mobile app. And if you're in the US or Canada, I'll send you a book. You get access to a lot of tools that we put out there that allow either worksheets or just frameworks that you can use to start thinking about your blueprint. What is your blueprint for next year? What is your blueprint for next month? Even just think about, make sure that the habits and tasks aren't overwhelming you. You need a system to try to figure out what habits and tasks. Are most important and more importantly, what they do to align to your blueprint. So sorry for the short podcast this week, but uh, hopefully you'll get some time back to do other things. Uh, we will be back next week with a guest. I urge you to join us. We've got some great guests in December, and then of course we'll line 'em up in FE in January and February to have a lot of good conversations about time management people, ai, all of the things that we normally talk about. But do go out to, uh, get the training bundle. Again, it's half off for the month of. December, I guess you could call it my cyber month, maybe my black, black month, whatever you wanna call it, instead of Black Friday. But we do wanna offer that out there. Go get, go get some training, call me, reach me out to me on LinkedIn, whatever. I'd love to hear what you're doing and how, uh, we can help. So if.