Melting to-do lists

Pacing is more productive than “being more productive”.

I used to try and squeeze maximum productivity out of a workday by tracking time, having well-itemised todo lists, and switching off my phone and other notifications while I worked (still do the last one).

Until I realised that the majority of things on my to-do list, that were taking up so much of that precious time, were all working towards a goal that wasn’t important… or no goal at all.

So I started setting quarterly and yearly goals (with the quarterlies being a fragment of the annual).

And stuff melted off my to-do list.

By pacing myself with the goal-oriented stuff, I didn’t need to scramble to get through the mountain of just, stuff.

Some just stuff that melted away:

• Scheduling 30-60 monthly posts on Instagram (I closed the Insta account)
• Reading through a dozen-or-so newsletters from various creative industries (unsubscribed)
• Reading through dozens of climate, sustainability and circular economy publications and articles to stay fresh (I still do this, but it’s more of a downtime reading thing now)
• Clearing my inbox to zero (I still aim for zero, just stopped worrying about it)
• Moving emails to their own folders (I now just mark them as “done” because I usually use the search anyway)
• Finding appropriate stock photos for every daily post (it always took longer than writing the post, so I just stopped adding a photo!)

Goals help you focus on the important stuff. My favourite thing this year has been watching my to-do list melt into insignificance 🫠

(…really just to a smaller list).