I’ve been digitizing my old journals and came across this note from January 7, 2012: “What do you do when you can’t do it all?” There’s not much context to go with that, other than another line, “My to-do list is huge.”
In other entries I wrote down that my to-do list was more than a page long! I know I rarely got everything on my list done. In fact, some things on the list never got done. Not every day was like that, but enough were that I became of student of productivity.
There are two ways to tackle an overwhelming to-do list. One, just work on the first thing until it’s done. Then work on the next thing. And so on. Or, cross off a bunch of items until the list is manageable.
Actually, it wasn’t that hard to get a handle my daily tasks. I adopted a system of 1-3-5 and Kanban. I reduced my to-do list to one important thing, three less important tasks, and a few less-than-urgent activities. When a to-do list is just one important task, it isn’t overwhelming at all.
In the process, I learned that many of the things on my to-do list didn’t need to be done. I guess they needed to be done at some point, but the world didn’t come to an end if I handled them some other day. Other to-dos were done by someone else. Those tasks were on others’ to-do lists, too. And some things just never got done. Oh well.
Now I’m curious. What things on my to-do lists did I never actually do? I’ll keep an eye out and let you know what I find.
Waite for it... 