You know.
On the simplest level, it's just nice to remind yourself 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.
If you're a knowledge worker, you have to be your own boss, your own manager. Even if you're not self employed and you have a real manager, the nature of knowledge work means you need to spend a lot of time working on complex, multi phase pieces of work independently, and that requires a lot of self discipline and some pretty involved self management. Unfortunately, we expect a lot from ourselves as workers, but we're not very kind to ourselves
as bosses. We want top performance all the time, and we don't take a moment to reward ourselves, to pat ourselves on the back when we do succeed. This is obviously detrimental to our happiness, but it's also ironically pretty bad for our productivity. If we're constantly berating ourselves and never pausing to acknowledge our achievements, we get stuck in negative feedback loops. Your to do list will never actually end, because you'll always need to add more items to it tomorrow.
And sorry, I don't have a solution for that. But what you can do is compile a done list so that the to do list doesn't expand forever in only one direction. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him. And this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. Welcome to your Favorite Tips across ten bite size episodes. I'll be sharing tips from some of the world's guest thinkers that you,
the listeners, have found the most useful. We're covering everything from creating better to do lists to setting more effective boundaries around your time, and you'll be hearing from people like best selling author Sally Hepworth, Corona Cast host and journalist Norman Swan, and Google's executive productivity advisor Laura May Martin. Today's favorite tip comes from Melissa, and she writes, my favorite tip is from your episode with Oliver Berkman about
reframing how we think about our to do lists. I actually consciously did this yesterday when faced with my dreaded to do list and gave myself a little high five at the end of the day for completing three separate documents and sending them out for stakeholder feedback. So here is best selling author and Guardian columnist Oliver Berkman talking about how he approaches his to do list.
Yeah, that is an incredibly simple notion. That is just the idea that in addition to all these lists that we keep or systems that we have to tell us and organize all the things we have not yet done, the sort of terrible weight of the of the not yet completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list of that you add to of the things that you complete. Right, keep keep keep a record of 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 band 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, in 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 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 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 list strategy and the long list and the short list, or I think in the book you're referred to it as an open list and a closed list. 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 iow 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's sort of automatically time boxes 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 time boxing is time would pass and you would have finished the task. But with this, you actually get to tick it 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 I personally love the idea of a done list. It avoids that all too common feeling of getting to the end of the day and
wondering what did I actually do today. On the days where I do remember to write a done list, I feel a really powerful sense of progress and like my time was really well spent, much more so than when I don't finish my day with writing a done list. As the listener of how I work, you've hopefully picked up a few tips on this show to help you work better, but do you want more, and maybe in a book form, because let's face it, books are the most awesome thing on the planet. Well, now you can.
In my new book, time Wise, I uncover a wealth of proven strategies that anyone can use to improve their productivity, work, and lifestyle. Time Wise brings together all of the gems that I've learned from conversations with the world's greatest thinkers, including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Mia Friedman, and Turia Pitt and many many others. Time Wise is launching on July five, but you can preorder it now from Amantha dot com. And if you pre order time Wise, I have a
couple of bonuses for you. First, you'll receive an ebook that details my top twenty favorite apps and software for being time wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading, cooking ideas and more. You will also get a complimentary spot in a webinar that I'm running on June twenty nine, where I will be sharing the tactics from time Wise that I use most often, and also some bonus ones that are not in the book that I use and love.
Hop onto Amantha dot com to pre order now. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Matt 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. I'm