Business leaders have a lot to do. The number of tasks that need to get done keeps expanding, and as a result the To Do list grows and grows. Some people manage tasks through sticky notes, some use technology tools such as Asana or Trello, while others use hand-written lists of stuff they need to get done.

There are a lot of ways to manage tasks, but the majority of us are still overwhelmed by our To Do list.  Here’s what I experienced when I took the helm of running our 3rd generation family business.

When you’re stuck, it can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. It happens when you, your department, or your company isn’t growing anymore. It also happens when you’re growing too fast and everyone is struggling to keep up.

This is a normal part of organizational growth—think of it as growing pains. In EOS, we call this Hitting the Ceiling.

Acknowledging when you’ve hit the ceiling is vital, because once you and your team have acknowledged it, it just becomes an issue that needs to be solved.

Ever have meetings where your team is stuck on a topic? Worse yet, you can feel when it’s about to happen because it’s happened so many times before.

Every entrepreneurial team experiences this during the course of growing their business. But to move forward as a business, you need to stop beating the dead horse!

At the beginning of a journey with a new client of mine, the leadership team was stuck on an issue about how to grow their service business over the coming year. Multiple members of the leadership team were passionate about different approaches, causing a seemingly endless repetitive discussion. Every time the topic came up, they started beating the dead horse again.

Clarity breaks are essential for business leaders to practice on a consistent interval. A clarity break is a scheduled time to get out of the office with just pen and paper to think. Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.”

Normally I like to share stories of client sessions, but today I want to share my personal experience with clarity breaks. Something you should know about me is that I’m a doer. I love getting things done. And I have to confess that for a long time, I resisted doing clarity breaks and would skip them because I felt my time would be more valuable knocking items off my To Do list. Plus, taking time to just “think” made me feel like I wasn’t really getting stuff done—after all, “thinking” was never on my To Do list.

When you prune a tree, you remove the dead or diseased parts so the whole tree will grow and thrive. If you don’t prune the tree, the whole tree is at risk of dying.

The same is true with businesses.