Finding Productivity: The 5/25 List

How to create clarity and refocus your priorities.

What is the 5/25 list?

In Short: It’s a summarized bucket list of 25 things you want to accomplish in the next 3-5 years with the top 5 items right at the top. Once completed, you will focus your attention on the top 5 and avoid all other listed items. AT ALL COSTS.

You need to stay focused on your top items and stop allowing other things to cloud your scope.

Here’s what you do, open your favorite note-taking tool. Create a numbered list of everything you find interesting and want to achieve.

Some examples:

1. Help my children do better in school.
2. Learn Spanish fluently.
3. Complete a master’s degree in economics.
4. Pivot my career into space station design.
5. Take a trip to Spain.
6. Enter into a fulfilling long-term relationship.
7. Create a healthy, more active version of myself.
8. Master a skill in (subject).
9. Learn to cook healthier meals.
10. Build a robot (seriously, put it all out there!).

Keep going until you have a solid list of interests and goals that serve your intentions. Be mindful that some of these goals are a little vague, that’s okay for now.

Also note that these are mostly personal goals, you can use this process for the workplace too either by having a separate list or one with the goals mixed in. Just make sure you don’t list too many workplace goals and end up with an imbalanced list that doesn’t really reflect YOUR bigger picture.

Once you have a solid long list, break it into 3 sections based on importance. The bottom list is the backlog. That’s anything you would consider a nice to have, sort of back burner type goal, but not super important.

The middle list contains your medium-priority items. These are items that feed into your top 5 as you complete those high-priority goals.

The most important list is your top 5. So pick 5 of your goals that you are MOST interested in achieving. These are the ones that help you feel more balanced, healthier, more well-rounded, or just make you a better you.

Those top 5 become your primary focus. AVOID the other listed items. Why? Because you really want to focus on what’s important and you want to do in a way that’s sustainable. You can’t focus on 20 things at once and realistically expect to do them all well.

When you have your goals in front of you, and you revisit them regularly, it’s much easier to say no to things that aren’t on that list.

Once you have your list, you can give yourself permission to do those things without feeling guilty, or lazy, or selfish. Why? Because they give you FOCUSED direction and purpose. You’ve just created a list to better align with who are right now and where you are going in the future.