The Elephant in Your Dreams (and How to Eat It One Bite at a Time)

It's 2:30 in the morning, and I'm writing this blog from my desk, fully dressed, teeth brushed, ready for a workday that hasn't technically started yet.

Why? Because yesterday I made a rookie mistake, and it turned into one of the most useful business lessons I've relearned all year.

Stick with me here, because by the end of this you'll have a three-step system for quieting your 1AM brain, plus a copy-and-paste AI prompt that can prioritize your entire to-do list before your coffee gets cold.

My days run like a Swiss watch

Normally, my days are consistent to the point of boring. Every day I'm up at 4AM, I brush my teeth, and I get dressed for the day. Then I head downstairs to feed the four cats (a.k.a. the Breakfast Committee, who start meowing at me the moment my feet hit the floor) and I take the dog out for her morning business. After that, I put on my war paint (makeup), make my coffee, and within the half hour I'm at my desk in my upstairs office.

The first thing I do at my desk is write in my Gratitude Journal, and then I go through my calendar and map out my entire day before the sun has even considered showing up. It's the same rhythm every single day, and that routine is the reason I get more done before sunrise than most people get done in a week.

Then July 4th happened.

The day off that broke my brain

Yesterday was Independence Day, and I did something totally out of character for me => I took an impromptu day off. The crazy part is that I had a client Zoom scheduled on my calendar for early that morning, so the day was supposed to look like a workday. Shortly before that Zoom meeting, a few friends & neighbors stopped by for coffee with donuts and bagels in hand, and before I could pour the first cup, it felt like half the neighborhood was in my kitchen using me for my barista-husband and my coffee machine. I moved my scheduled Zoom meeting, and the workday officially surrendered to the coffee party.

Normally I work at least a half day on Saturday, but instead I played coffee hostess all morning (a three and a half hour coffee party, if you're keeping score). Brett and I spent the rest of the day celebrating our day off, catching up on our TV shows and eating like royalty; by 6:30PM we were both so gloriously worn out that we went to bed.

Brett takes a little while to wind down whenever he goes to bed, while I can be asleep within seconds of my head touching the pillow. Last night was no different, and I was out cold like a toddler who skipped her nap and paid the price.

You can do that math. By 1AM I was wide awake, staring at the ceiling, and my brain decided this was the perfect moment to call an emergency board meeting.

Every agenda item came marching in: the things I could be doing, the things I should be doing, and the things I NEED to be doing. And of course my phone was less than a foot from my face, because I "use it as my alarm clock" (the official excuse of everyone who sleeps with their phone, myself included).

Laying there in the dark, two questions kept circling my head. The first was what keeps me up at night, and the second was how do you eat an elephant.

The question my clients can never answer

When I'm working with clients, one of my favorite opening questions is, "What keeps you up at night?"

Do you want to know a secret? Most of the time, they can't answer it. There's this long pause while their eyes do laps around the room, and you can practically hear the gears grinding.

And I'll tell you exactly why. They have too much. There is SO MUCH keeping them up at night that the noise is deafening. Asking them to name their most pressing problem is like asking somebody at a fireworks show to point out the loudest bang. It usually takes everyone longer than just a few minutes to tune out the dozens of problems screaming for their attention just to find the one or two that are the most pressing.

So I usually follow up my first question with, "If you wrote a brain dump list right now, just a list of ALL the things you need to get done or ALL the things keeping you up at night, would there be more than a dozen items on it?"

They almost always nod.

"Two dozen items?"

They usually nod slower.

"Are there more than three dozen?"

I'll normally get nervous laughter, which, in my line of work, counts as a yes.

Then I ask the immediate follow-up question, "Have you ever heard, 'How do you eat an elephant?'"

Most people know the answer: "One bite at a time."

Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.

That's when the work starts. We carve the elephant into bites, we pick the first bite, and we prioritize the daylights out of it.

The accidental meditation

So there I was, back in my bed at 1AM, staring blindly at the dark abyss of my bedroom, listening to my husband and cat snoring next to me. Somewhere between "could be doing" and "should be doing," I noticed something: for the first time in a long time, I was lying still with zero distractions, just filtering and organizing my own thoughts. I was sorting my elephant into bites, in the dark, in total silence.

Psst, there's a name for that. It's called meditating. (Something I would tell you I do regularly, but I don't.)

My accidental toddler bedtime gave me something most entrepreneurs never schedule time to have => quiet, uninterrupted thoughts. An hour of it, lying in the dark, sorting the noise into order. By 2:00AM my elephant was carved up, the first bite was so obvious that staying in bed felt pointless. So I got up, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and walked into my office. The clarity that came out of my unplanned meditation hour is the reason you're reading this blog right now.

So what does any of this have to do with your business? Everything.

The One Bite Method

Steal this three-step method and start it today.

Step 1: Schedule quiet time, and start embarrassingly small

Put time on your calendar every day to empty your mind and organize your thoughts. Going from "I've never meditated a day in my life" straight to an hour of daily om-ing is a recipe for quitting by Thursday, so start with a gratitude journal or ten minutes of sitting still before the phone comes out. The size of the habit matters far less than the existence of the habit.

Step 2: Brain dump everything, then let AI pick your Top 3

Grab a notebook (or your phone, since we both know it's within arm's reach) and dump every single thing rattling around your head onto one list: every task, every worry, and every "I should get to that." Write it all down, no matter how long the list gets, because getting it out of your head and onto paper is half the relief.

Then paste this prompt into ChatGPT or Claude, along with your list:

Below is my brain dump list: every task, worry, and project currently rattling around in my head. Act as my lean-focused Chief Operations Officer and do four things. First, ask me up to three clarifying questions, starting with the goal that matters most to me right now. Second, sort my list into the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix, where important means it moves me toward that goal: Do (urgent and important), Schedule (important but less urgent, so give it a calendar slot), Delegate (urgent but less important, so name who or what could handle it), and Eliminate (neither, so cut it). Third, identify the ONE item that gets me to my goal fastest, meaning the item that, if I finished it this week, would make the most other items on this list easier or unnecessary. Fourth, break that one item into bites I can finish in 30 minutes or less, and tell me the very first bite to take today. Here's my list: [paste your brain dump]

A few minutes later, you'll have what my clients pay good money to find: the front of the line.

Step 3: Take the first bite (and make it tiny)

If your goal is to lose weight and you haven't seen the inside of a gym in months, scheduling marathon workouts is how you end up back on the couch within a week, feeling worse than when you started. Take a short walk instead, then stretch it a little further every day, because baby steps stack.

The same rule runs your business, whether you own one today or you're still dreaming one up from your desk job. Your first bite counts when it passes two tests: you can finish it in one sitting of thirty minutes or less, and you can start it without waiting on anyone else's permission, approval, or input. "Build my website" fails both tests because it's an entire elephant leg, while "write one sentence describing what my business does" passes with time to spare. If you catch yourself procrastinating on a bite, that's your signal it's still too big, so cut it in half until it feels almost laughable, whether that's sending the one email, making the one call, or drafting the one paragraph.

Once you've picked your bite, give it a home on your calendar, because a bite without an appointment is a wish. Schedule it into tomorrow's quiet time (yes, the quiet time from Step 1, this system feeds itself) and protect that slot the way you'd protect a meeting with your biggest client. When the time comes, put the phone in another room, set a timer, and eat.

Then comes the part almost everybody skips: before you stand up, choose tomorrow's bite. Momentum dies in the gap between finishing one thing and deciding the next, so close that gap while the win is still warm. One small bite a day sounds slow until you do the math on a month of it, and the elephant shrinks faster than you'd expect. If you miss a day, the elephant will forgive you, so pick the fork back up tomorrow.

The mountain can wait for you, and the first step is waiting on you.

Motion = Results.

Your 1AM brain deserves better

So let me ask you the same thing I ask my clients: what keeps you up at night?

The next time you find yourself wide awake with the ceiling as your only audience, remember this: the noise means you've got an elephant, and elephants get eaten one bite at a time. Quiet time, a brain dump, and one small first bite is the whole recipe.

And if you want a partner at the carving table, I'd love to grab a virtual coffee with you, because slicing up your elephant goes a whole lot faster with a second set of eyes on the knife. Grab a spot here.

With Grace, Grit & a Toddler's Bedtime,
Jo