The one-way to-do list

Hey there, it's been a while! But I'm back. And today we are going to talk about to-do lists and the most important hack that will transform your to-do list from a piece of paper that you just write down and forget to something very short, very concise, and yet very powerful. Let's go! I've been thinking a lot about how to name this technique. I haven't come up with anything interesting or novel at this point in time. At first, I thought that I should name it a "stubborn to-do list" because you have to be very stubborn in order to follow this technique. It forces you to become very stubborn. It's the other way around. But the word stubborn, I think, has some negative connotations, so I'm not going to use it. In the meantime, I'll call it "the one-way to-do list" until I come up with something more interesting and unique. But for now, let's stick with "the one-way to-do list". So this is the method that I personally use when I'm in the dark time of my life. When there is burnout, when the mood is not there. Maybe the weather is affecting me negatively. Basically, when you don't have any motivation. You're just so tired to even think about complicated productivity systems, journals, to-do lists, to-do apps, calendars, and all of that. You're so tired. You're so done with anything productivity-related. And you're in this funk and you can't really get out. And you need something easy, something helpful, small baby steps. And this method is the simplest yet very effective thing that you can do when you just want something very simple, something that you can start doing today, something that you don't have to go out and buy fancy notebooks, buy some apps, do the brainstorming. None of that. It's very, very simple. And this is what it is. You write down your to-dos for the next day. And I recommend limiting it to no more than three to five. Five is the absolute maximum. Three is the best I think. But if you have like a few tiny things that you want to get done, that wouldn't take too much time to ensure they can do fine. And then you write them down in order of priority. So the first one is the most important one second, this the next most important one. And so on. And here's an important note. You need to evaluate where you've been in the past week or two. Later on, I'll be giving an example of writing a report for work. But depending on where you've been recently in terms of your mood, your overall wellbeing. If you haven't done the dishes for the past two weeks, if you haven't gotten out of bed for the past two weeks, then the report is not your most important task for the day. That's too much. You need to start with something small. Maybe making your bed and doing the dishes will be the items that you will put on your to-do list. Again. Be realistic here. I said in the very beginning that this is very effective when you're in a dark place. Maybe it's in the middle of the winter. You haven't seen the sun outside for the past two weeks. And it really affected through a mood. Maybe something happened. Something that threw your entire life off. And here again, don't focus on work reports or study or all of that. Start using this technique with something basic. Home-related, wellbeing-related tasks. Maybe cooking yourself at breakfast. Making the bed. Taking a shower. This is where I need you to be honest with yourself and realistic. This method will eventually get better after a week or two of using this on very basic items of your daily life. Then you'll feel confident and then you can increase the intensity and the difficulty of these tasks. But start small. Okay. Now coming back to the practice itself. So you wrote down your three to five to-do items the night before. And the next day you wake up and you start from the very first. So you wake up, you do your morning routine, have breakfast, what have you. And then let's say your first meeting is at 11:00 AM. And now you have maybe two and a half hours to work on something. Yes, there is an email. Yes, there are slack messages, but even just 30 minutes, what can you do from the very first item on your to-do list? What can you do? And you start there. Any difficult task that you put on your list has a natural stop point, especially if it's a task like a work-related task or studying something that requires cognitive resources. So let's say the most important tasks that you have for today is to finish this report at work or like some presentation, or if you're at school, maybe finishing the first draft of a paper. Let's take a work report as an example. You write it down. You do everything that you can, and then eventually you come to this natural stop point. And examples might be, you need some data to complete this report and you have to ask someone to get this data. So you would send an email to this person, and then you can't really proceed till you hear back from them. So then at this point, your first to-do list is on pause till then. You can move on to the next to-do list or if it's something urgent, yes, you can check your email at this point, but then eventually you go to the second to do item and then you work till you hit and natural stopping point. Or maybe you are done with this task. Maybe your second to-do item was to write an email and send it out. Okay. So you've done it, so you cross it. Then it's 11 o'clock, and it's time to go to your meetings. You go to your meetings. Then it's lunchtime. Then it's 1:00 PM. You're back. And then when you take your to-do list, you don't go to number three. You always go to number one. After your meetings, after your breaks, when you sit down at your desk and you look at your to-do list. That's why I call it "one-way to-do list" - you always start from the very top. So at the very top, we have this report that you requested some data. Then you go to your email and check if you've heard that. And if you've heard back, then you start with number one and you do the number one first. If you haven't heard from the person that you're waiting for then you move to number two, but we've done number two. So you are okay to move to number three. Maybe it's doing some follow-ups or reaching out if you're in sales. So you do that. And then if there are no natural stop points, or if you haven't been interrupted by something, then sure, complete this task and move on. Then let's say you have another meeting. You go do that. So meeting is done and then, you know, you have few hours of free time. Again, you look at your to-do list and where do you start? You start from number one. So you don't start from number three, from number four, from number five. You always start from number one. If there is nothing you can do about number one yet, only then you move to number two or number three. You kind of have to become the stubborn person who is like, yeah, I don't care what's on the list down in like number four. What's number one? And you always start with the top of the list. You do this after every meeting, after lunch, after a break, you come back to your desk and you look at number one. By doing that, the most important thing gets done much faster. First of all, you don't even have an option to procrastinate doing number five, because you always have to start with number one. And number five are usually the tasks that are easier the number one. So the top priority tasks are usually the hard ones, the ones that we tend to procrastinate on. That's why you need to approach them more often. Otherwise, your brain will trick you and then put this task on the back burner. It will forget about it, but if you have the one-way system of dealing with your to-do list, you always start from the top. You're reminded about your top priority task. Yes. Sometimes it will migrate to the next day. And that's fine. In this example you don't hear back from your co-worker. You don't get your data back. Then this tasks migrates to the next day. And then the next day it's still your number one. And then you ask yourself, is there anything I can do about this report? And in this case you might follow up. In this case, you might reach out to someone else and ask for this data from someone else, you know. Other steps open up. If it's been two or three days, then you can definitely expedite it to your manager. There are steps that you can do about this report. Or you can just submit the report and say that this data is missing. And once you get the data you will update updated, there are numerous things that you can do about number one, right. So in the morning when your brain is fresh, you come to your desk, you sit down and you're looking at your to-do list. And number one is the most important task for the day and you're fresh. Your brain is fresh. And you are full of energy. Then the same thing after lunch. So you take a break for lunch, then you come back. Again, refreshed, energized, and you sit down. And what's on your to-do list? Number one, again, the most important task. Every time you're ready to start, you had a break, you had maybe some coffee, you had some food then maybe you went out and worked out, if you do that during the day, you come back full of mental resources that you can dedicate not to emails or slack messages, to something useful. And then you always have your number one, number two items on your to-do list, ready for you to spend these valuable mental resources on these items. So how I personally do it is I have a calendar in my office and I limit myself to three items per day. The rest of them are habits that I'm tracking on this calendar as well, but they're separate. But in terms of to-do items, I have no more than three items per day. I prefer to write them down the day before, but if not, I have at least the first one written down the night before. If not, I'll complete the whole list of all three in the middle. And then it's on the wall. It's staring at me. It's kind of separate from all my little pieces of paper, my notebooks. The squares are small on the calendar, and they kind of limit the number of things I can put in there. In my case, I can only put three plus some habits, some checkboxes, but that's it. So highly recommend using the calendar, having it somewhere separate, because if you put it on a piece of paper. it get's lost on your desk. You can put it on the sticky note and put it on your computer. That's fine. But you have to keep it somewhere separate because the importance of these three tasks is vastly different than everything else. And the goal here is not to get everything done. Okay? No. And that's what I keep telling my clients as well when they join the monthly method. The goal is not to get everything done. The goal is to stick with this practice where you have some rituals, you have your sprint plan sessions, you have your sprint review sessions. In this case, the practice that you have to stick with is always starting from the very top. Whenever you sit down at your desk, you look at this paper and you start from the very top and you forget about everything else. Always start from the top, no matter what. Always start with number one till it's done. When it's done, you always start with number two. Even if you're waiting on something, then go and check if you've heard back. If not, then you move to number three. So some of the things will not get done. But if you stick with the practice of starting with number one and only moving down once you've confirmed that there's nothing you can do about number one, the number one items will get done a lot, a lot faster. That's it for today. Again, I've missed doing this podcast. We will be back on a regular schedule. Podcasts episodes are released every Monday. So please subscribe, if you want to get the freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday. But for now, have a wonderful week. Again, if you don't know where to start, you feel overwhelmed, you're not ready to commit to the entire productivity system like the monthly method, that's fine. Just start with this to-do list method, stick with it for a week and you'll be amazed how effective it is. And then it will be easier. Once you build the momentum, it's easier to get things done. But remember - no more than three to five items on your daily to-do list. Those are the most important. Everything else can go on a separate piece of paper. But this to-do list that I'm talking about should have only three, maximum five items per day. Okay. That's it. Have a good week. And, I'll talk to you next week. Bye.