Keep a Broken List

You're in it right now.

Peak season. Events stacked on top of each other, weekends that blur together, a phone that does not stop. And somewhere in the middle of it, something goes sideways and you say it out loud, probably louder than you meant to:

"We have GOT to fix that."

And then you fix nothing.

Which is fair. You're busy. You're supposed to be busy. Fixing it in October is a luxury you don't have in September.

But here's what actually happens. In January, when you finally have time to think, you sit down to plan the year and you cannot remember what it was. You remember the season was hard. You don't remember why.

Memory is a liar

This is not a character flaw. It's how memory works.

Your brain smooths out the ugly parts. It compresses ten weeks of chaos into a feeling. And the specific, expensive, fixable things (the ones that actually cost you money) are exactly the details it drops first, because none of them was catastrophic on its own.

The 40 minute load in. The tech who showed up without the shot list. The $400 in rush shipping. The client who was uncomfortable for 20 minutes because nobody knew who was calling the timeline.

None of those ruined your year. All of them repeated. And by the time you're planning the next one, they're gone.

So most owners plan next year from memory. Which means most owners plan next year from a highlight reel.

The whole idea

Keep a broken list.

One note on your phone. That's the entire system.

Every time something annoys you, costs you money, slows you down, or makes a client uncomfortable, you write one line. Not a solution. Not a plan. Not a project. Just the line.

"Load in was 40 minutes late again"

"Nobody knew who was calling the timeline"

"Second tech showed up without the shot list"

"Ate $400 on rush shipping. Again."

"Had to text three people to find out if we owned a second follow spot"

That's it. Four seconds. Then back to work.

Four rules that keep it alive

One line. Never a paragraph. The second this feels like documentation, you'll stop doing it. If it takes longer than the time it takes to hold a door open, it's too long.

Do not solve it. This is the rule people break. You don't have time to solve it, and solving it right now is not the point. The point is capture. Solving is a November activity.

Write it while you're still mad. Angry you is a far better auditor than rested you. Angry you writes "the shot list thing AGAIN." Rested you writes "improve internal communication," which is useless and helps nobody.

Never delete anything. Repeats are the entire value. One line is an annoyance. The same line written six times is a business problem with a price tag on it.

What you do with it in November

You sit down with the list. And something great happens.

You stop guessing what to work on.

Read the whole thing top to bottom, then do three passes:

Pass one: circle the repeats. Anything you wrote more than twice goes to the top. You already voted on these, in real time, under pressure. That's better data than any planning exercise you'll do in a conference room.

Pass two: put a dollar figure on the top ten. Not a precise one. A napkin one. What did that actually cost, times how many times it happened. Some of these will surprise you. A recurring 40 minute delay across 30 events is not a scheduling annoyance, it's a full work week you paid for and did not sell.

Pass three: pick three. Only three. Fix three things well between November and February and you will walk into next season noticeably lighter. Try to fix eighteen and you will fix zero, and you'll spend next season writing the same lines again.

Your off season plan just wrote itself. In your own handwriting. By the version of you who was actually there.

A note on how small the fixes usually are

Here's the part that surprised me.

About a year ago, I sat down to try this AI vibe coding thing everybody was talking about. I'm not a developer. I know just enough to be dangerous, and that is being generous.

And the very first thing I built, before anything clever, before anything anybody would pay for, was a broken list helper. A text box. A date stamp. A dropdown to tag whether the line was about money, time, a client, or my sanity. That was the whole app. It took an afternoon and it was not pretty.

But it took the habit from "a note buried in my phone" to something that could actually sort itself in November. And it worked.

I've built more than a hundred apps since then, including the software my coaching clients run their companies on. Not one of them taught me more than that ugly first one, because it proved the thing I keep telling owners and mostly failing to convince them of:

The gap between a problem you complain about every week and the fix for it is usually one afternoon. Not a budget. Not a developer. Not a system overhaul. An afternoon.

You just have to know which problem to spend the afternoon on. Which is what the list is for.

Start it today

Open your notes app. Title it whatever you want. Mine is unprintable.

Write the first line right now, because you already know what it is. You've been carrying it around for two weeks.

You'll have 30 lines by Halloween. About six of them will be worth real money.

And in January, when everybody else is planning next year from a highlight reel, you'll be planning yours from evidence.