I’ve wrote about this same thing before years ago when I really started establishing my to-do list as a cornerstone of my progress. While the to-do has served me incredibly well, I think I really need to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach it.
The main issue is that I still treating as if I have set work hours, and that my to-do should take me exactly as long as my set work hours.
There are a few ways in which this is extremely harmful:
- It causes me to drag things out longer than they need to be if I see that I should have plenty of time
- It causes me to get distracted with other misc. activities for the same reason
- I have a tendency to add new things to the to-do list if I’m ahead of schedule
One of the points of working the way that I do is that I’m focusing on output and results rather than time spent working.
The way I’ve been approaching my to-do list is completely counter-productive to that.
I need to think carefully about what I want to accomplish in the day, and then do that and only that.
And most importantly, I need to be laser-focused on finishing it. No distractions, no new tasks, nothing.
I need to just blast through it.
And if I finish super early?
Great! That’s the dream. I’ll have the whole day to do other stuff.
So I need to do that, because I’ve felt frustrated lately that I seem to not have any extra time, even on days when my to-do was supposed to be easy. I think this is exactly why.
So let’s do better.