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