Esther Brown wakes up at 4 AM to swim. She runs a diagnostic lab, gets her MBA, takes upholstery class with her mom every Tuesday, and is building a wellness brand on the side. She's had COVID five times. She's experienced burnout. And she told her friends she wants to start "dating" them because monthly is all she has time for.

Now she treats her life like her lab: constant risk mitigation. Every morning starts with an energy check. Her entire to-do list adjusts based on that number.

What You'll Learn:

Why she bases her entire to-do list on her energy level each morning (low, medium, or high)

The magnet method: how she redesigned a million-dollar lab using Staples poster board and cutouts

Why thinking is harder than doing (and how she protects time for deep work)

How she spent her first three months as VP at the bench, not in her office

The "Do Not Do" list: protecting energy by writing down what you won't touch today

Dating your friends: making a monthly pact when that's all you have capacity for

Her Sunday ritual with jazz music: planning what must be true by Friday

About Esther: Esther Brown is VP of Operations at Nexus Medical Labs. She's getting her MBA, building a wellness brand for working women, and applying risk mitigation thinking to everything from lab workflows to burnout prevention.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quizMore episodes: thetodoshow.com

When Jennifer Ruiz tells people she makes paper flowers, they say "how cute." Then they see her four-foot installations for Valentino and L'Oreal and the reaction shifts to "oh." She works as a caregiver from 10:30pm to 6:30am, comes home to take her son to school, then creates massive floral installations on four hours of sleep. She's exactly at the financial breaking point where her business income matches her caregiver income. Not above it. Not below it. Right there.

What You'll Learn:

Why "paper florist" gets a different reaction than "I make paper flowers"

How she learned to create giant flowers by watching YouTube tutorials in Russian and Korean

The language kit she created so crafters can speak corporate to luxury brands

Why her rental flowers (which last three years) are her biggest money maker

How the paper florist community shares leads and pricing instead of competing

What it's like to keep 80% of your business details stored in your head

Why flowers became her escape and healing during a difficult time in her marriage

About Jennifer: Jennifer Ruiz is a paper florist based in California who creates massive floral installations for luxury brands and weddings. She teaches monthly classes and is working toward running Petal Loft full-time.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quizJennifer's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petal_loft/?hl=enMore episodes: thetodoshow.com

Lauryn creates dark, moody wedding photos. Not the bright, airy Pinterest style everyone expects. Her style makes people feel something they can't name. She edits each gallery two or three times, uploads it, then sometimes pulls it back down to re-edit more. While doing this obsessive perfectionism, she's listening to Stephen King and wondering who the killer is. Her 8-year-old daughter has adapted. She doesn't ask "Mom can you do this?" anymore. She says "Mom, can you set an alarm?"

What You'll Learn:

How constantly witnessing the deepest sentiment of people's hearts at weddings makes her "kinder to my husband. I'm like, aw my God, I guess I love you too."

The printed list method: checking off every shot so the next 45 minutes are free to just be creative

Why one bride grabbed scissors and redid her entire bouquet mid-wedding (and Lauryn just said "okay I'll be back")

Her slow season list includes: taxes (sad face emoji), call Fidelity, make welcome guide, blog 47 weddings

The question creative people face: "It's generally creatives who have the most awful evil taxes, and it's like, this is the opposite of what our brains were built for"

What Taylor Swift knows about work-life balance that wedding photographers should steal

About Lauryn: Lauryn is a moody wedding photographer based in the Philadelphia area who specializes in dark, saturated, atmospheric images. She got diagnosed with ADHD a little over a year ago and runs her business through a system of alarms, post-its, and organized chaos.

Links: Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quiz More episodes: thetodoshow.com

Alina Fattakhova tells her clients which women rejected them and exactly why. She's a luxury matchmaker in New York City, and people pay her to deliver brutal honesty wrapped in strategy. She treats finding a life partner like applying for jobs. Spreadsheets, data points, reverse engineering your timeline from age 35 backwards.

What You'll Learn:

Why people apply to 200 jobs in two weeks but won't do the same for dating

The "illusion of choice" problem in New York City dating (and why it makes people less willing to commit)

How raising prices actually brought better, more self-reflective clients

What it's really like to tell a 40-year-old man why stunning blondes keep rejecting him

Why nerdy clients with dating spreadsheets often find patterns they need to break

The accountability party trend: forcing yourself to do hard tasks (like scheduling a sleep study)

About Alina: Alina Fattakhova is a matchmaker and founder of a boutique matchmaking agency in New York City. She went from luxury jewelry sales to construction bidding to discovering her real talent: connecting people. Now she runs events, screens matches, and gives people the reality checks they're paying for.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quizMore episodes: thetodoshow.com

Vicky used to run weddings. She'd be there when the couple arrived and couldn't bring herself to leave until the last guest did.

Now she's a calligrapher doing around 100 weddings a year, engraving £360 perfume bottles while people watch, and trying to figure out how to stop saying yes to everything.

What You'll Learn:

What a calligrapher actually does in a day!

The different perceptions of calligraphy in the UK versus the US.

Why the creativity is always the first thing to go when your calendar gets too full

How doing cold outreach feels like sending a naked photo of yourself

Why two artists obsessed with beauty both keep the plainest to-do lists

The spa day that completely backfired because she couldn't stop thinking about work

Why this is the first year she's putting a cap on how many weddings she'll take

About Vicky:

Vicky is the calligrapher behind Inviting Writing, based in the UK with her husband and dogs. She went from hotel management and wedding coordination to building a calligraphy business that covers weddings, luxury brand events, signage, and hand-lettered maps.

She teaches calligraphy courses, listens to nineties dance music while she works, and is currently learning the hardest skill of her career: saying no.

Links:

Instagram (Inviting Writing): https://www.instagram.com/invitingwritinguk

Instagram (Signs by Vicky): https://www.instagram.com/signsbyvicky

Website:

https://www.invitingwriting.co.uk

Teepublic:

https://www.teepublic.com/user/inviting-writing

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quiz

More episodes: thetodoshow.com

Ryan Doyle grew up with an Irish Catholic grandmother, strict rules, and a constant sense of doing everything wrong. Then he went to clown school in France where they insult you, f*ck with your head, and force you to face the fact that people are going to hate you...

What You'll Learn:

• How Catholic guilt and shame actually become creative fuel
• How clown school trains you to stop caring what people think
• The cut-up technique: stealing text from anywhere and sculpting it with the delete key
• Why his fiancée is his only audience before anyone else sees his work
• Gremlin Day: one day a month with zero rules, pizza, weed, and Real Housewives
• The Hindu priestess who gave him a flower that unblocked his throat chakra
• How he's working 10-12 hours a day on one insane show after years of being scattered

About Ryan: Ryan Doyle is a writer, performer, and clown creating Free Speech, a one-hour show that performs every type of speech possible. He does typewriter poetry at weddings, wrote a board game over seven years, and paints himself green to sing Rat Pack songs as a goblin.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quiz

Follow Ryan: ryan-doyle.com

More episodes: thetodoshow.com

Coach Lee wakes up at 2:30am. Works out, builds her coaching business, then goes to her full-time job as a criminal defense attorney. She's in bed by 8:30pm. And her coaching philosophy is "The goal is once we finish working together, for you not to come back." That's a terrible business model. And exactly why it works.

What You'll Learn:

• Why she calls it "procrast-planning" (when you plan instead of actually doing the thing)
• Her 2:30am-8:30pm schedule that lets her run two full careers without burnout
• The three categories for any task: must do, need to do, want to do
• Why following productivity gurus without adapting to your lifestyle always fails
• Her "terrible business model": teaching clients to never need her again
• How to check if what you say is important is actually, factually what's important
• Why she's "very anti hustle and grind, but not anti hard work"

About Coach Lee: Coach Lee is a criminal defense attorney and productivity coach who believes in realistic, sustainable systems over guru advice. She helps high-achieving women build schedules that actually work for their lives, not someone else's Instagram version of productivity.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quiz

Coach Lee's Website: www.legallee.me

More episodes: thetodoshow.com

Amanda Kwan works her corporate marketing job from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Then she preps food until 2am for her underground dining concept that seats 22 people and has a 400-person waitlist. She sleeps 4-6 hours a night. She hosts 60-person Thanksgivings. And she chose all of this.

What You'll Learn:

• The invisible labor of being The Organizer: the friend who remembers birthdays, makes reservations, hosts everything

• How she manages calls at 3am with Japan and 11pm with the West Coast

• Starting a private dining concept during COVID that turned into a 400-person waitlist, all word of mouth

• Her "if I die tomorrow, I'd die happy" operating principle

About Amanda: Amanda Kwan runs global marketing for a Hong Kong brand while operating Savour Cinema, an underground dining concept she co-founded during COVID. She also runs an events company, organizes TEDx talks, and leads Women of Influence at AmCham Hong Kong.

Links:

Discover your To-Do List personality: thetodoshow.com/quiz

Savour Cinema: @savourcinema on Instagram

More episodes: thetodoshow.com