Transcription
Here's why I'm not a big fan of to-do lists. There's a prevalent myth out there when it comes to how to properly use to-do lists. Now, many productivity experts claim that to-do lists are kind of this magic technique that whatever you write down on the to-do list will suddenly get done for you.
The fact is, most of us recycle half of our to-do list from day after day after day. Why don't we do the things on our to-do list? Well, a list of to-do's is a list of output. What we're not considering is the input.
For example, if you were to go to a baker and say, "I need you to bake me a hundred loaves of bread," the baker would say, "Well, where's the input? I need the flour, I need the sugar, I mean the yeast, I need the salt. I need the input in order to create the output."
Well, for knowledge workers, what's our input? Our input is time. So, my advice is, don't just keep a to-do list of output without also having an accompanying list of input. And that input needs to live on your calendar.
So, when you have tasks on your calendar, don't have tasks like, "Finish this project," "Do this task." Instead, your only goal should be to work on that task for a set period of time without distraction.
Why is this so important? You see, studies find that people are terrible at predicting how long a task will take to complete. And this is why we don't seem to get anything done by the end of the day because things take so much longer than we expect. So, we get to the end of the day and we feel like losers because we still haven't finished everything on our to-do list.
Instead, with a time-box calendar and your goal of working on a task without distraction for a set period of time, you feel like a winner after every single time box because your only goal was to work on what you said you would work on without distraction.