{"id":3661,"date":"2016-05-01T08:02:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T15:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/?p=3661"},"modified":"2016-05-01T08:02:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-01T15:02:43","slug":"avoid-too-many-shoulds-in-your-task-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/avoid-too-many-shoulds-in-your-task-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Avoid Too Many “Shoulds” in your Task List"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 1, 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n

We all have a tendency to list too many shoulds<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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<\/em> tool, not a self-flagellation tool.<\/p>\n

If you feel strongly about listing shoulds, here is one approach.\u00a0 Schedule them as defer-to-review tasks<\/a>. With defer-to-review tasks, all you are committing to do is to review<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3661"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3674,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions\/3674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellinenberger.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}