Undoing The To-Do List

If you clicked on this story then, odds are, you have a love/hate relationship with your to-do list. Perhaps you have taken the gurus' advice about making it the night before. So as you sit in your pajamas with your herbal tea, listening to the calming strings on a sitar, you begin to empty all your worries and objectives for the next day into your bullet journal. “This seems reasonable,” you lie to yourself. The bunnies on your slippers look up at you in pity.

The simple truth is: your ambition is getting in the way of your productivity.

We have heard it before — less is more — but it is so convenient to ignore. We feel good (i.e. we feel productive!) when we make our towering to-do lists and begin fantasizing about how we will check off each item in a maelstrom of efficiency. The crowd will cheer as we scratch off the last item and pop the cork of the chilled champagne (“-place champagne in the refrigerator” was an earlier item on the to-do list). Today will be the day that everything gets done! This will get the ball rolling on a future where no project gets left behind and your fifth-grade teacher will have to eat her words about your future being as dim as the kid beside you who everyone called the glue eater.

And then the next night, that familiar scene: hunched over your desk, back aching, papers strewn everywhere, a piece of your lunch crusted onto your cheek, as you check off the fourth item on your hundred-item list. Another failure. Mrs. Abbott was right. You add “buy glue” to your to-do list for tomorrow. Time to embrace your destiny.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

As someone who recently completed his PhD, I have essentially made a career of being a student. My to-do lists and I have been fighting the good fight together ever since 7th grade when they consisted mostly of “soccer practice” followed by “hang out with Jake and Kyle.” When I was doing my master’s degree the lists were slightly more involved. Jake and Kyle were busy; the soccer team had disbanded decades prior. My lists instead read,

“read Les Misérables,” “write conference proposal,” “find love.”

Simple tasks. Easy to knock out on a commute.

And yet still somehow I found myself drowning in undone tasks on a list that only grew deeper with every passing week. This is the most demotivating way to end a day. I realized that I needed to treat myself better and that it had to start with giving myself more reasonable objectives.

“Embrace your constraints, Julien!” I would tell myself in the mirror in the good times.

“Love your flaws… ‘cus that’s really all you got, bucko!” I despaired in the bad.

In graduate school (like in many other professions) you are asked to do more than is possible — more pages than you can read, more notes than you can take, more essays than you can write, more ideas than you can stomach. Like for other dilemmas… the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Once I accepted that I could not do it all, I was finally free to be happy doing what I could.

I got to work immediately cutting apart my to-do list. No task was too important to be left on the cutting room floor. I no longer asked, “how long will it take me to get all this done today?” But rather, “which tasks do I want to complete in the eight hours I have?”

The next radical change I made was acting like a bouncer for my to-do list. Not just anyone gets in. You gotta look good, have some ID, and bring some cash in your pocket. In other words, what is this task going to do for me? The more selective I was about what made it onto the list, the more I felt like I was making real headway towards my goals.

To give a concrete example, in many of my seminars I would be asked to read, say, 1000 pages in a week. Once I accepted that this was a fool’s errand I began to triage the reading before I had a chance to fail. Whereas before I would simply write, “Read Book X,” my to-do would instead list something like, “read chapters 2–4, skim 5–7, read intro and conclusions of 8–10.”

Another issue that I always came across in my to-do lists was that I could never get ahead on projects with future deadlines. Instead, the earlier I started them, the longer they took. It turns out, this is totally normal. It’s even got a name: Parkinson’s Law. The introduction to a 1955 Economist essay on the topic gives a striking (if slightly dated) example:

IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

Put another way, we will complete a task with all the available time we have for it. We need to stop giving these greedy tasks so much of our time! And the best way to do this is to keep them off the to-do list until their time has come.

Making these changes allowed me to actually complete my daily goals, which meant that at the end of the day I could close my books and think about something else for a few minutes before my head hit the pillow. A good to-do list is not a long one, it is a completed one.