Dear reader, if you have been following my blogs for some time, you might know I share my productivity and creative writing tips from time to time. I love making plans for every year and for decades I was Mr. To-Do-List. I still love the feeling of ticking off items of a To-Do list, but over time I have certainly changed my strategies and went from tedious, impossible lists to more manageable bites. Then I heard something that changed my approach altogether, at least for my day-to-day life.

The Endless To-Do

The thing about To-Do lists is their tendency to be endless. There’s always something new to do and something to add to the list. This applies to many of our life’s aspects. From our jobs, to our home situation. It even goes so far that my backlogs started to feel like To-Do lists. I have two main backlogs: One for books and one for video games that I want to play. But the problem is that I usually add more to these piles than I consume, which means they have a tendency to grow. Another problem that arises from this is that hobbies start to feel like work that way and that’s just not a very healthy thing. Hobbies are meant to be relaxing, but adding challenges and even planning time for your hobbies can quickly make it feel as if you’re just doing another job. And that’s never a good thing.

So, we are presented with a big problem. If there’s always something to do, how should we go about treating To-Do lists? Do they actually add value, or are they only serving as a source of stress, because we never get the entire list done. Or, if we finally do get through one of the lists, a new one will present itself shortly. In other words, it is as endless a story as laundry. It never stops, as long as you live and breathe.

Getting rid of To-Dos (for work)

Keeping your work manageable is always a good goal, and I do believe To-Do lists can serve a purpose. Especially when hard deadlines are concerned, or when you need to make a priority list and just need a good overview of what is expected of you that day, or period. I am still a proponent of To-Do lists when they serve a purpose, but years of working with them also showed me a big downside of them and that is that they can bring a huge amount of stress, because the lists just don’t get shorter. Backlogs in software development have a tendency to grow. Developers can tell you everything about their issue backlogs. There’s no shortage of work and it usually stacks ad infinitum, or nassea, whichever you prefer (I don’t think either are very enticing, but I want to give you some choice here).

Getting rid of To-Dos for (office) work is usually not a very viable option, but I would argue that we can get rid of large, unrealistic lists, by simply starting every morning with the approach described in the wonderful little book Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy. Make sure that you prioritize the most important task that needs to be completed that day and make sure it is the very first thing you do. This has multiple benefits:

1. The most important task will be finished first thing during you work time.
2. You will start the most important task while your energy is still fresh.
3. Anything after this task will feel easy peasy.

Besides making the right priorities, I would suggest not putting more than three items on your list for every given day. That way it feels much more manageable and if you have more time/energy left after completing the three most important items, everything else is just a bonus.

Your life is not a To-Do List

When it comes to your private life, you might catch yourself “workifying” your hobbies. I described this earlier, but it’s something I catch a lot of people doing. There’s always things that must be done. Like we have to play board game X, or watch movie Y. The problem is that we usually have way more things to do than we have time for, and it leaves zero room for spontaneous activities. It’s just another sign that we really need to stop planning every nanosecond of our time and that we need to let go of the word must.

The moment we start making our hobbies into something that feels like work, it loses all its value. Take the fact that a lot of people even look for ways to monetise their hobbies, by starting a YouTube channel about it, for instance. The moment you do, your main hobby becomes a new job instead: Making videos about your hobby. The real question is: Is that worth your time? The thing about hobbies is that they are what we do in our free time. Something we enjoy to relax, so why do we have a tendency to make it into something else? You’re not going to find an answer in this blog, but it has a lot to do with the way Western society is built around being a meritocracy. The real kicker is that you don’t have to become the best in your hobby, or be able to make a living off it. You will find that almost all of the time, such a thing isn’t feasible anyway, or else everybody would be doing it. You should be doing it, because you enjoy it.

I would plead to make hobbies hobbies again. Something you do, because you genuinely enjoy doing it. Don’t enjoy it? Look for a new hobby or interest and focus on that. Don’t turn it into another chore, or even worse, work.

The Done List

Recently I heard something and decided to try it out. Instead of making a To-Do list at the start of every day, why not just reverse it altogether and make a Done list at the end of every day? I enjoy sitting down at around 22:00 in the evening to write something in my journal. Just some thoughts about my day. Now I started by writing down a list of all the things I had done today. Not only was this a fun way to reflect on the day, but I also found that I had actually done a lot! Without making a To-Do list.

As it turns out, I am perfectly capable of deciding what needs to be done during a day without planning every single thing out. Who would have expecte that? To be honest, writing down a list of things you’ve done feels a lot more satisfying. That’s because it’s things I have already accomplished. You can decide for yourself just how big these things need to be, before you will put them on the list. They can be work on important projects, to even mundane things like making coffee. I suppose it just depends on what kind of day you went through. Sometimes you have all the energy to take on the world and other days it might be an accomplishment to just get out of bed and take a shower. That’s all perfectly fine, as long as it felt like an accomplishment, or maybe just something nice you did for somebody else, or yourself. It’s your journal and your life, so you get to decide what goes into your journal and onto your Done-list.

Conclusion

I basically handled two subjects in this blog. One is that I feel hobbies need to be hobbies again, because we have a tendency to treat them like work. This does not only limit itself to hobbies, by the way. Sometimes we can even handle our relationships like this, by planning appointments and specific activities. This is not how I want to live.

The other big topic was the To-Do list and while I am still a proponent of writing things down, you can reverse it and just write everything down you did that day, instead of writing a To-Do for that day. One thing that is a very big downside of To-Do lists is that if you don’t get every item done on a list, it can feel like a massive disappointment and while you can get better at planning and making realistic To-Do lists for a day, it can feel very restrictive. There will always be times when we have deadlines and can’t wish away an important thing we need to do that day, but we can be less rigid in our approach to life and just let things happen more spontaneously. So try it sometime, don’t make a To-Do, but write down the stuff you did at the end of the day and let me know how that felt!

Have a good one!

Jeffrey