businessDec 1, 202333:11pending

Question-Why Does My To-do List Keep Growing? - DBR 007

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

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About this episode

My task list just keeps getting longer and longer; what do I do?

There are a couple of things.

#1 If you're constantly having to ask yourself "what do I need to do now or today", you can count on your brain to come up with some things. Whether or not they're the right things is pretty questionable. More on this in other episodes.

#2 recognize that things can come off of your list. Let's go into detail on this now.

Most people default to the following statement, whether they are aware of it or not:

If I decided to try to do it yesterday, and didn't get it done, then it is AUTOMATICALLY a priority for today.

This statement is not AUTOMATICALLY true. It may be, but it may not be. We have to think about it.

Consider the situation:

If you're facing an imminent deadline, the task retains its high priority overnight.

Brew some coffee and call your spouse.
Focus on the minimum viable product.
Use this later as a sign that you need to get your productivity system straight.

If you are not facing an imminent deadline, you're working on the 'important but not urgent' tasks in your life

recognize that you don't have high deadline pressure - you can choose when to do the task
find the right context for the task
PROPERLY postpone the task

identify the next day/time that 1) the correct context will be available, OR 2) you'll be able to create the correct context
postpone the task until that time (that means REMOVE IT from your list and otherwise forget about it)
get on with today's work

If you automatically move tasks in the second category, then you have an old habit that is holding you back.

The Habit: almost all of us grew up with a deadline-driven productivity process, so we automatically move yesterday's unfinished work to today.

Here's what I mean

In school, we deal with things in a deadline-driven manner.

all deadlines are "hard" deadlines - there is NO grace period - in addition, a partial result is not at all useful
tasks are poorly defined
there are few mechanisms to 'bank' work
in-progress feedback is seldom available

These things teach us that:

setting early deadlines doesn't work
work naturally and AUTOMATICALLY expands to fill the available time
we need to "put in as much work as you can between now and the deadline"

Therefore - if we didn't put time in yesterday (as we planned), then we're automatically behind and need to force the work into our schedule today.

But, in the workplace...

many deadlines are 'soft' or at least negotiable and often a well-done 'partial' product is quite useful
often our 'best effort' is what's expected
we are able to 'bank work', but may need to learn how to do it well
we can often request in-progress feedback

Together, these things mean that our habits from school are not always applicable to our work in our jobs. It is our habits of thought that make us believe we AUTOMATICALLY need to finish yesterday's work today.

I want to be careful on this recommendation. It hinges on two challenging ideas:

we know the difference between postponing and procrastinating.
we have a system that keeps track of our decision to postpone

The best way to figure these two things out is to implement your Attention Compass. It helps handle postponement decisions well and to keep track of your backlog of tasks.

In the meantime...

Start developing ways to keep your task list from growing.

Develop the means and tools to effectively postpone tasks until the proper context.

I hope I've answered the question to your satisfaction. If not, keep asking. As I said, I love having questions to answer so reach out and let me know what I can talk about that is most valuable to you, where you are now. Email me at [email protected] or hit me on LinkedIn