Crush Your Day With This Powerful System for Organising Your Tasks
<p>Having a to-do list is Productivity 101.</p>
<p>It is the sacred cow of all-time management strategies. Everyone has one. Everyone thinks they need one. It is an assumption that is never challenged.</p>
<p>Until now.</p>
<p>So let me enter the fire and say it.</p>
<p>The to-do list causes so many problems.</p>
<h1>How not to use a to-do list</h1>
<p>Here’s what we usually do:</p>
<ul>
<li>Start the day with your list of tasks</li>
<li>Cross them out as you complete each one</li>
<li>New work arrives so you add it to your list</li>
</ul>
<p>If you have done well, your list might be shorter by the end of the day. Sometimes it is longer. But whatever happens, it is never empty.</p>
<p>This is ridiculous. You’d never do this in any other area of life.</p>
<p>This approach creates 3 major problems.</p>
<h2>Problem 1: It doesn’t help you decide what to do.</h2>
<p>You look at your list of tasks.</p>
<p>How are you going to decide what to do?</p>
<p>The to-do list itself offers no help. You already have more than you can do in 1 day. So you will turn to other ideas such as the silly urgent/important matrix or the Pomodoro technique.</p>
<p>You end up doing a random mixture of:</p>
<ul>
<li>the easiest</li>
<li>the urgent</li>
<li>the important</li>
</ul>
<p>There is a better way.</p>
<p>But let’s consider the other 2 problems first.</p>
<h2>Problem 2. It only offers demotivation</h2>
<p>Imagine finishing work knowing you have completed <strong>all your tasks</strong> for that day.</p>
<p>You feel content, stress-free and fulfilled.</p>
<p>The traditional to-do list leaves us with a sense of failure at the end of the day. It is never completed. We lose every single day. This makes it hard to get motivated. Endless tasks don’t energise us.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/practice-in-public/crush-your-day-with-this-powerful-system-for-organising-your-tasks-2c9ab3419770"><strong>Learn More</strong></a></p>