How to Get Rid of the Worst Things to Do
I have a bad habit of doing things. I make big, ambitious lists of things I want to do and then let them pile up in my to-do app until I’m so scared that I quit the app and start a new one. (I, like several Lifehacker commenters, do not know how I got the job at the productivity site.) But I found a way out of my current debt.
Form Design author Frank Chimero maintains a complex to-do list . He assesses the difficulty of each subject, so he doesn’t overwhelm any day. In the morning he tries to solve a couple of difficult problems, and in the afternoon he does more simple ones. When he finishes the task, he checks to see if he predicted its difficulty correctly, so he improves his workload balancing. And every three months he downscales what he calls Payback.
In Reckoning, Chimero looks at all the things he keeps putting off — those tasks that are shamefully shuffled from one day’s to-do list to the next, over and over again. Usually he is afraid to do it. At the end of the quarter, he must do one of two things with these tasks: complete them immediately, or acknowledge that they will never be completed. Either way, they should be off his to-do list.
You can calculate once a month or even once a week: no matter how long it takes to feel the consequences of not completing the task. This way, you can really “figure out” if you can simply not complete the task. Maybe you’re never going to re-paint your bedroom; maybe you can put your homebrewery on the sidelines. Maybe you really don’t need to go to the dentist !
The point is to relieve you of the burden of those unfulfilled tasks. If you don’t, you are not helping yourself by pretending to do it. And you can always add them later . So let them go.
Because if you didn’t, you could be me, clinging to your lifelong unfulfilled tasks , your crowded to-do app where all your imaginary accomplishments were displayed like a map at the beginning of a science fiction novel. These unrealistic cases may be nice to look at, but they can’t help you navigate the real world. Do them further or delete them.
Reckoning is just one part of Chimero’s extensive list of productivity tips that you should read twice and then save to read again. Here’s another important point: “When the list for the day is ready, do not go back to the main list. Productivity rewards shouldn’t be a bottomless source of labor. “
A Modest Performance Guide | Frank Chimero