This is part 2, of a multi-part series exploring the principles of personal productivity, with the goal of making it the last thing you’ll ever need to read about the topic. If you missed it, you can read part 1 here.
If you’ve applied the first principle of productivity correctly, and created a list of every item that was bouncing around your head, you will have come to a startling conclusion: You have even more to do than you thought.
This is the part that none of the four books that I listed in the previous email really talk about, and I kind of wish they had. For those of us that have obsessive or completionist tendencies, the need to cross everything off that list can create new stress.
However, the only way to manage this is to acknowledge that we’re never going to get to the end of our to-do list. As humans, we have a nearly infinite capacity for dreaming up new goals and things to do. However, we have a very finite amount of time in which to accomplish these. Whether you look at this from the perspective of the 8 hours in the workday, the 7 days in the week, or the roughly 4000 weeks the average person has in their life, the math doesn’t add up. You can’t do infinite things in a finite period of time.
Leonardo Da Vinci — who we know as one of the greatest geniuses of all time in fields as diverse as painting, engineering and biology — died with most of his projects unfinished. The things for which we remember him, like the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, are the exception, not the rule. For the most part, most of the projects he started were never completed. If a genius like Da Vinci couldn’t get it all done, what makes you think you can? (By the way, we know all of this because Leonardo captured all his thoughts in notebooks -- see Principle #1).
And so, the only mentally healthy solution to this problem is to accept that you can’t possibly get everything done, and learn to be okay with that. Some people will have an easier time accepting this than others. If you consistently have over 1,000 unread emails in your inbox, you’ll probably be okay with this. If you have to make sure your inbox is empty before going to bed every night, then this will be more of a challenge (we know who we are).
Applying the Principle
You’re now going to revisit the long list you created when we talked about principle #1. If that list is your “To Do” list, you’re going to use it as a starting point for a new list, your “MUST Do” list. The “MUST Do” list is a list that you create every day. You can do it first thing in the morning, or the night before. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you do it every day.
The “MUST Do” list is absurdly simple. Using your “To Do” list, pick just 1 to 3 things that you MUST DO today. That’s all. Just one to three. Regardless of what happens in the day, you MUST get those things done. So, rather than being overly ambitious, I’d recommend starting with just one thing, and only if that one thing is very small, would I go to two or three. This will force you to make sure that you’re focusing on only the most important things. Once you’ve completed that one thing, then you can move on to other things on your super long to do list. But remember, you’ll never get to the end of the “To Do” list. You MUST, however, get to the end of your “MUST Do” list every day.
Put your “MUST Do” list somewhere where you can see it. It should be in your face all day until you get everything on it done.
Do this every day for at least a month. After a month of doing this, you’ll find that you’re doing this automatically, and you probably don’t actually need to create the “MUST Do” list. You’ll be able to just pick things off your longer to do list. But for now, take the time to do the exercise daily.
The goal behind the “MUST Do” list is two-fold. First, it relieves the psychic stress of not completing the list. You can celebrate the accomplishment of completing your “MUST Do” list every day. Second, by being so short, it forces you to focus on the most important things (we’ll talk a lot more about this in upcoming principles).
What Comes Next
Some people see our limited time, and our inability to get everything done as the problem that productivity is trying to answer. That is not only wrong, it’s unhealthy. Limited time isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a fact of life that needs to be accepted. If you try to “solve” the problem by “doing more with the time time that you have,” then you are confusing efficiency with effectiveness. Which bring us to the next principle that we’ll discuss in the next email.