You and I are finite beings, my friend. That's a pretty abstract concept until you think about just how much stuff we need to get done every day. Oliver Berkman, who's a Guardian columnist and best selling author, says, the amount of things that we could potentially do every day is by definition infinite, and a finite being with an infinitely long to do list is not a happy being.
This causes most of us to start our days feeling like we're in productivity debt and our to do list is our ticket back to zero, back to a clean balance sheet. But according to Oliver, this is really a ticket to misery. So how has Oliver done a mental reframe on his days to lead to a happier but still productive life.
My name is doctor Amantha Imba.
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work, a show about how.
To help you do your best work.
On today is my Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Oliver Berkman and we start by talking about Oliver's done list and why he created one.
Yeah, that is an incredibly simple notion. That is just the idea that in addition to all these lists that we keep our systems, that we have to tell us and organize all the things we have not yet done, the sort of terrible weight of the not yet completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list that you add to of the things that you complete, right, keep keep
a record of what you do. Some of the ways that people organize there there to do is will naturally create these, Right if you're sort of moving things among columns on a can ban board or something like that, you're going to naturally come up with a list of
completed items. But if you're the just have a sort of regular to do list, like keep one other list where you literally write something down every time you've you've crossed it off one list, or even if you wasn't on that list, you know, if you do it, write it on the done list. I think you know, on the simplest level, it's just nice to remind yourself that that you sort of almost always, even when you feel like a day didn't go very productively, you actually probably
did a whole lot of stuff. It's incredibly easy to forget the sort of number of genuinely worthwhile things that you did on a subtler level. I think it helps challenge this notion that a lot of people have and that I certainly am still to some extent afflicted by that you sort of start each morning in a condition
of what I called productivity debt. You know that like you owe it to yourself or maybe to your boss or something to like to sort of pay off this debt through being productive, and hopefully on a really good day you might get back up to like zero balance. You might get yourself out of overdraft and out of debt and back to zero, which is a really kind of I mean, there are lots of reasons for it, but it's a really unfortunate and self punishing way to
frame work. And it's tied into all these kind of ideas that people have about their self worth and about the idea that they're not really justifying their existence on the planet. Not really don't really have a right to exist unless they unless they sort of pull off a
certain amount of tasks. Obviously, people are in jobs where they do, in another sense, have to do a certain amount of tasks to get paid, but in this existential sense, you know, I think a lot of people have, certainly me historically, have tied up their sense of sort of basic adequacy as a human with how productive they're being.
And the great thing about a done list is it sort of rewires this a bit, and it helps you to think, well, how about you start the morning at zero and everything that you do is extra, like it's a deposit into your productivity bank account instead of just paying off a debt. Why not think about it that way? Why not think that you're absolutely enough as you are, and then if you manage to do a whole lot of cool things today, that's all extra and it's all great.
That's so cool.
I love that reframe because I've never been able to consistently keep a done list, even though I really like the advice and interesting. I've recently changed my workflow around how I managed tasks, and I was listening to you talk about your to do this strategy and the long list and the short list, or I think in the book you referred to it as an open list and a closed list, which really yeah, which really resonated with me,
And I've recently someone put me onto this software called Motion. Annoyingly, there are two calendar software is called Motion and for anyone that is interested, it's Usemotion dot io dot com.
And how it works is that you have your combines your task list and I guess this would be the well I guess the closed list with your calendar, so you're seeing both on the same screen and you enter your tasks on the left hand side, and you assign an approximate time of how long they would take to complete, and then you drag and drop them into your calendar, so it sort of automatically timeboxes for you in terms of that task then becomes a meeting with yourself and
then when you finish the task, like normally, what would happen if you were just doing normal timeboxing is time would pass and you would have.
Finished the task. But with this, you actually get to ticket off and it stays in your calendar, but it's kind of grade out, so like you get to the end of the day and you feel that sense of achievement or progress because everything you've completed is still there, but it's ticked off, and you get to tick it off as you go through your day, which also you know it's just good in terms of giving you that
dopamine hit as you go throughout it. But it's also good in terms of not over scheduling yourself because you kind of like you like if you treat that task list as the closed list, and then you make sure that you have time to fit everything physically into your calendar, then you kind of end up with this perfectly balanced calendar.
I find that is it for today's show. But if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that help me work better, from research findings to software to gadgets that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from dead Set Studios.
And thank you to Martin Nimba, who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much.
Better than it would have otherwise.
See you next time.