How to Escape the Dangerous Temptation to “Do Stuff Now Before I Forget”

Do you ever command yourself to “Do It Now Before I Forget?”

If this sounds familiar, you may also recall the anxiety that accompanies the thought. It floods your body with Adrenalin, covering up a real fear of failure: that you don’t have what it takes to remember to do the task later.

This unfortunate belief doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Research shows that it’s born of past memories — the times when you failed. You neglected to record, retrieve or execute a pre-planned task on time. In the maelstrom of all the stuff you had to do, you mismanaged the commitment, then formed a negative judgement about yourself which persists to this day.

Unfortunately, a decision to drop everything else you are doing to attend to an “emergency” comes at a cost. Psychologists tell us that it takes 25 minutes to return to the same level of productivity after an interruption. Furthermore, these self-interruptions are even worse than external interruptions, according to Ioanna Katidioti and her colleagues at the University of Groninge.

But in that moment, when the pressure is on, it feels as if it’s the sole alternative. You may even know that it’s impossible to be productive while jumping from one task to another. But that doesn’t matter. It just feels a lot better to get the task done NOW, before it’s too late, preventing it from dropping into a bottomless, dark hole where many other fine commitments have fallen. Taking immediate action is the best way to ward off the sting of bitter regret.

Is there a path out of this seeming trap? Here are 3 steps which can help.

Adopt a Mindset Which Nips Guilt in the Bud

Perhaps your Mom or Dad were the first to tell you to “do something now before you forget.” If so, it was more than a helpful reminder: lurking behind the suggestion was a hidden accusation. They believed you were about to fail, showing a lack of faith you still carry in your psyche even though you no longer live at home with them.

Today, your own mind has become your accuser, taking up where they left off. It blames you: your character and personality. You should be able to keep track of everything you want to do. You are bad and wrong because you don’t.

If you have these thoughts, it’s time to let them go.

Instead, update your concepts with the following idea based on research: as an ambitious person, you regularly create more demands on your time than you can fit in 168 hours. There’s nothing wrong. Only 11% of professionals complete all their planned tasks each day, according to a Linkedin study.

There’s also nothing wrong with having a system which hasn’t evolved to the point where it can handle all your tasks. It doesn’t mean that you are irresponsible. It just means it’s time for an upgrade.

The fact is, these realities are ones productive people face all the time. They regularly keep pushing until new errors creep in and their systems fail. The big difference is that instead of playing the self-blame game or reverting to “Do-It-Now-Before-I-Forget”, they work on developing improved habits, practices, and rituals. They also find better-quality tools.

For them, making such upgrades is not a onetime accident, but a career-long pursuit. They expect to play the game of continuous improvement in order to keep up with their own rising expectations. The best way to engage is to ramp up their ability to find the right changes to implement.

Become an Expert Self-Diagnostician

Keeping up by finding new improvements isn’t easy, based on my observations of learners who struggle to pinpoint their very next upgrade.

The challenge doesn’t usually come from their level of motivation. That’s normally OK. Their difficulty lies in figuring out the handful of changes they need to make that will provide the biggest bang for the buck.

The internet, with its millions of suggestions, makes this an uphill battle. In the area of task management, articles usually focus on either behavior changes or new tools. The sheer volume of suggestions on a source like Medium, for example, means that you must become an expert detective who can diagnose your methods before sifting through them all.

The reason is simple. The way you manage your tasks today is a unique, self-invented medley of behaviors and tools which you started to put together as a pre-teen. You continue using them well into adulthood until a turning-point occurs at which you decide: “I should be able to get more done.”

If you are one of the most productive people, this admonition triggers an intense round of introspection. It kick-starts an analysis of your current methods. Once you have an accurate picture of the way things are, you can start your search for precise solutions. Once they have been discovered, you can convert them into small changes which, when implemented, increase your ability to manage more tasks.

Just ask members of one group of extremely time-starved people: triathletes. Apart from the tiny number of paid professional athletes, they have jobs and families like everyone else. The only difference is their commitment to be race-ready for an event which includes three separate sports. This means they must find 6–20 spare hours per week for practice and endurance building.

To do so, they create a training calendar which encompasses every waking hour, including pre-set times to retire to bed and wake up the next morning. When I did an Ironman, a bed-time alarm was the way I learned to fall asleep early enough to awaken for pre-dawn training. For me, the skill of scheduling everything became critical. I discovered that it separates those who finish races from those who wish they had the time to train.

Adapting Total Task Scheduling

These extreme calendar users who schedule everything must master two skills: how to keep a lot of tasks in existence without a single one disappearing, and how to ensure that no deadlines are missed. The only way to accomplish this feat is to become what I call a “Total Task Scheduler.”

Much has been said to discourage people from this particular ambition. Some follow the dictum of Getting Things Done and other books which instruct readers to use their calendar only for appointments. According to them, tasks which can be flexibly scheduled belong only on lists.

Our research at 2Time Labs based on peer-reviewed studies leads to a different conclusion from that of these popular authors. Instead, the average person must make a number of transitions several times in his/her career in order to keep up, as shown in the diagram below.

The advice that flexible tasks only belong on lists flies in the face of our findings. In fact, a careful reading of these author’s content shows little or no empirical research behind their advice. Some haven’t even tried Total Task Scheduling for themselves, or show any knowledge of new auto-scheduling tools.

Also, their advice won’t work for you if you are trying to escape the “Doing Stuff Now Before I Forget” trap. With a large number of tasks, you must use a system which accounts for the limited time you have available. Why? You have already reached the point where free time is at a premium: every task is now competing with every other task for precious space on your calendar.

People who restrict flexible tasks to their lists run into a problem. They must check and re-check their entire collection of to-do’s several times per day to make sure something important isn’t slipping through the cracks. The only alternative is to commit all these tasks to memory. Either approach drags people into decision fatigue. The competition between tasks takes place in their minds, which is an awfully taxing way to conduct this difficult activity.

A Total Task Scheduler (operating at Levels 5 and 6) finds a way out. To paraphrase the words of David Allen, “Your mind is not for saving and re-juggling your calendar, it’s for executing it.” She puts her entire calendar of flexible tasks in an app, not in her brain.

When someone asks her “Are you free this afternoon?” she consults Google or Outlook Calendar to see which appointments and flexible tasks she had planned to attend and complete. To build this calendar, she sits down each day, batching the decisions she must make into a single session. During the day, she ends each activity by revisiting her calendar, not by trying to remember what she planned to do, and certainly not by revisiting her entire collection of incomplete tasks.

Plus, he experiences less stress. Task lists which don’t use or track due dates or durations make it easy for users to miss key deadlines. Research shows that the way to fix this problem is to place the task on your calendar, which helps you manage critical dependencies in a realistic way that doesn’t require an IQ of 200.

Notwithstanding these benefits, the transition to Total Task Scheduling is challenging. It’s so hard that people who make their first attempt fail miserably, especially if they only use manual methods — Level 5.

But like any new system of habits, practices, and rituals, it takes time for it to stabilize into a trusted method. The reason I founded Schedule U is to provide a way to ease this transition, by learning the best practices and tools. They are being uncovered in research and used by other people.

But I’m not just the founder of ScheduleU, I’m also a user of its ideas.

In the past 24 months, my 15-year practice of Total Task Scheduling has undergone a dramatic shift with the introduction of new, AI-powered auto-scheduling software-Level 6. I happen to use SkedPal (and work on projects for the parent company.) Other apps I have found include Focuster, Sheldonize, TimeTo, and SELFPLANNER. Companies like Google, Todoist and Microsoft have also introduced machine learning in their products with, in my opinion, limited success.

But I keep scanning the horizon for new apps and better features. Like most people who attempt extreme scheduling, my habits are evolving, even as I experience tremendous time-savings. The Adrenalin and anxiety caused by losing track of tasks have given way to a fresh peace of mind.

If you also manage lots of tasks, you may be at the threshold where your current approach no longer works. Your freedom from stressful feelings may require a step or two up the ladder; the time may be right to follow the steps I described. They represent one way to free yourself from the false urgency created by using a system that just can’t handle all the tasks you want to get done.

P.S. For 12 free lessons on scheduling everything, visit here. And please recommend the article by clicking on the applause button below.