How often do you wake up and think, “Crap, I have so much to do that there’s no way I’m going to get it all done today”? If you’re like me, then you have some variation of this thought pretty much every day. But what if there’s a better question that you should be asking?

What aren’t you going to get done today? It’s a fun twist on the classic question, and if you’re a decision-maker in an organization or a solo venture, then it’s probably one that you should be asking yourself more often.

If you’re a manager, executive, solo entrepreneur, etc., then it’s generally pretty easy to see how the things you do make money. This is because you’re close to the top, so your work is amplified through others (e.g., vendors or marketers) and it becomes easy to see your efforts come back through sales.

This can make it tempting to want to do everything all at once. But the truth is that you have to decide which things you can and can’t work on, and sadly, not all of the things you work on will directly make you money. Paying your employees does not directly generate revenue, but it’s still probably in your business’ best interest to make sure that gets done.

Trying to balance all the things I have to get done (both those that do and don’t directly generate revenue) has put me into an odd position recently. I come with a long history as an executive in a corporation that bought and sold businesses, and my experience has been that those always required a lot of work, but I had a team to share a lot of the burden.

Now, as I’m taking on an acquisition for the family business, things are very different. Starting up this new franchise is a family venture, which naturally means that a lot of the legwork with getting things started falls on me. Which, as you might imagine, is extremely different from the days when I could wave my hand and send a task down the line to someone.

Because now I’m “someone.”

So with all of this on my plate, I’ve retreated to my happy place, which is my whiteboard. And for a while, that was enough to keep me sane and functional. But one day last week, I was staring at my whiteboard and realized that I no longer understood what anything I’d written down meant.

I had a list of things to do that day and the next, one corner with urgent items, another corner of responses that I was waiting on, and wedged in just about everywhere else were tasks that had come up or that I’d been asked to look at with a color-coding system that I could no longer understand.

In other words, my world was on fire.

And it wasn’t on fire because of the things I had to do—at least not only because of them. It was on fire because I’d decided that everything was an urgent item that couldn’t wait. As I stared at my whiteboard, which looked like it should’ve been hung in a padded room, I realized that I was never going to get this all done right then, and that was going to have to be okay.

This is where we circle back to you, my esteemed reader. Before you get to the brink of madness like I did, you need to consider how much you can realistically get done in a day and then decide which tasks you’ll take on that generate revenue, and which tasks you’ll handle that keep your business running.

Where does that process start for you? For me, it started with wiping my whiteboard clear (after taking a picture to make sure I didn’t lose any items), then remaking my lists first with only the items that generate revenue, then anything that would cause the organization to explode tomorrow. The rest…it just went away for now.

I remember this time as a keen mind methodically assessing and unraveling problems. My wife remembers this time as a lot of cursing, bitter mumbling, and more than one instance of throwing things.

Regardless, the whiteboard is now back in order, and when I wake up, I decide what things I won’t be working on that day. My wife remains dubious as to how long I’ll be able to keep this up, but for the moment, I’m maintaining my sanity by charting my day according to what I won’t get done, and if you’re struggling to figure out how you’ll get everything done, then I’d recommend that you, like me, start making peace with the fact that you simply won’t.