The minimal to-do list
Try switching your thinking from what you need to do to what you can achieve and rein in that to-do list
My life is a series of things I have to do.
The things I have to do today — find random ingredient for dinner, buy body moisturiser, meet work deadlines — and the things that are brewing in the long term, such as deciding whether we get a car and whether we move out of London and constantly awaiting The Thing that will make us decide. However you store these things — in your head, an app or, if you’re like me, a paper diary — I suspect that your to-do list is a also beast that you’re constantly trying to tame.
I’ve researched and tried different approaches to the to-do list and didn’t find any of them sustainable because they didn’t tackle my overwhelming feeling: that I wasn’t getting enough done.
What changed things for me was reading that marketing supremo Ann Handley uses a ‘daily achievables’ list, turning the notion of ‘things I need to do’ into ‘things I can do today’. It’s a powerful bit of positive psychology.
At the start of each working day I write down my three work-focussed achievables for that day.
They could include handing over one part of a project to another team member or editing a blog post for a client. I then write down one personal achievable: to go for a swim, to walk the dog at lunchtime, to order some train tickets. At the end of each day, barring any significant intrusions, I have ticked off all four things and reminded myself that the things I ‘do’ in my personal life are more than just routine, they’re achievements, too.
I’m sure you could extend this to five achievables or ten because we know we do more than three things in our working day, but that would be to set yourself up for failure.
How often do you complete a task in full and how often do you come back to it tomorrow? It’s the minimal nature of the list that breeds success.
Of course, this works most effectively when you understand how the achievables fit into a bigger picture so that each day you can reflect on your progress towards a wider goal, without being panicked into a state of inertia by it. How are you going to redevelop a client’s website if you don’t edit each blog post? And how will you be fulfilled during the project if you don’t appreciate each stage of its journey?
I love fancy stationery as much as the next person but in this case it would be a hindrance to the simplicity — and, thus, sustainability — of the concept. Take a pen, a post-it note and, with minimal fuss, decide what you’re going to achieve today.
