May 1, 2016
We all have a tendency to list too many shoulds on our task list, trying to force ourselves to do things we think we should be doing. But if you do that too much, it is a surefire way to kill your list.
By shoulds I mean things we have told ourselves we ought to do, often for moral reasons, or due to others’ opinions, but that we know we are really unlikely to do. In fact, we actually have little or no intention of doing many of them. We list them out of guilt, or maybe even hope. But usually there is a heavy feeling associated with these tasks—we’ve tried to do them before and failed, and we hope that by putting them at the top of our list we’ll finally shame ourselves into do them.
It’s fine to mix a few aspirational tasks in with our normal tasks. But if we list too many, and we keep skipping them, it kills the list. If we fill the list with things that we skip over constantly, then we lose faith in the list. And those items give the entire list a heavy feeling, so much so that we don’t even want to look at the list anymore.
So keep the “shoulds” count on your task list to a minimum—don’t kill your list. Don’t use your list for a morality game. Rather, the 1MTD or MYN task list should be a practical tool to track and organize things you really intend to do. It’s a prioritization tool, not a self-flagellation tool.
If you feel strongly about listing shoulds, here is one approach. Schedule them as defer-to-review tasks. With defer-to-review tasks, all you are committing to do is to review and reconsider them, say once a month—they are not a promise to do them. That lowers the frustration if they don’t get done, takes them off your main list on most days, and so keeps your list fresh and usable; but it still puts them in your awareness periodically.
What I do is periodically move one or two of those to my main list and see how it does. Sometimes we are just waiting for the right timing, and that gives it a chance. But if such an item sits there too long, I move it back to defer-to-review, or finally delete it. No sense clogging up your action list with undoable shoulds.
I think this is a critical step for me which I’ve missed. I’ve ready your books and set up the task lists and found that the sheer volume of stuff I’m not really ever going to do makes the idea of a weekly and monthly review discouraging and I avoid it.
Sorting by start date has made my lists somewhat relevant, but they drag so much along with them that they are not energizing.
Thanks for this pointed advice. I will try it!
This is an incredibly important concept, and I want to thank you for sharing it. I didn’t realize this myself until recently when I looked at my list how often I would feel bad about it because things weren’t moving. I finally created a Someday/maybe folder and I put those things there and review once per month. It is making a big difference. Thanks Michaelfor all of your insights, I have gained a lot from this over the years.
I absolutely agree that having too many “should’s” on the list creates problems. The list becomes too long, you can’t finish it, you feel guilty, and then you don’t want to look at the list.
The limits that he suggests for each section of the list have helped me get over this problem. When I know I should only have about 5 items in the critical now section and 20 items in the medium priority section of the list, then I do a much better job of making the hard decision about what will really get done and what is aspirational (a “should”).
Be careful though of just throwing everything 1 or 2 days in the future, that makes the list cleaner, but forces you to make the “should” evaluation every couple of days as all those deferred tasks re-appear.
Making these decisions are hard. Figuring out a way to make the decisions and come to peace with the decisions is the critical step.