Not finishing to-do lists

Every week I write a long list of things that I want to complete. These are all wonderfully exciting  things to work on, and I always feel lucky when I look at my list. I work as a humanitarian supporting global response operations. Our teams work to understand the situation and bring in aid to places like Niger and Ukraine. But the daily grid is much less exotic. Here is a sample of the categories in a daily to-do list:

• Making an early breakfast and getting the family out the door to their work and school days. 
• Driving to my workspace
• Phone calls with people in Washington and farther afield in places like Niger and Senegal working on data analysis.
• Clearing out email inboxes, marking most messages as read and responding to the ones that relate to my work priorities.
• Carving out two hours for  deep work such as writing, solving a work problem or creating a spreadsheet or data visualization.   
• Laying up a pot of beans to slow cook for dinner.
• Heading out for a sixty minute run in the evening to clear the mind.
• Taking care of some bills and ordering random household goods on Amazon. 

There are a few rare times when the universe cooperates and I finish everything on my to do list. But most weeks, I do not complete all the items, and many things get left undone. 

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This non-completion can create a cycle of negative self-talk. Feelings of slacker, lazy and loser creep in, and the script sounds like: “Why can’t you get it done? Can’t you work harder and concentrate better? You suck. You think you are good but you are not. You study productivity and can’t even get your own to- do list done.”

This negative internal dialogue is not necessarily true or based on reality, but the human brain seems to create these thoughts out of fear.  

Why this happens
Daniel Khenemen identified the Planning Fallacy where the human brain consistently overestimates our ability to complete a task within a certain period of time. Tony Robbins says that we overestimate what we can do in a week and underestimate what we can do in a year, or decades. We put our aspirations on the list, not the things that we know from experience we will be able to complete. 

We overestimate the time that we will be able to keep our brains in focused attention and minimize the time required for administration, light work, commuting and inevitable distraction. We set up a series of subconscious decision points throughout the day that invisibly chips away at our ‘decision energy bank’, leaving us deposed and less able to create and enjoy. The weekly to-do list is essential but also uniquely positioned to fail.

Designing our to do lists with human psychology in mind
The do-do list is essential, but we can redesign and use the tasks in an enjoyable and more gentle way. Here are a few mindsets, strategies and tactics to move out of the negative self-talk space and reset for the rest of the week. 

Mindset
Forgive yourself! We are imperfect humans with a uniquely wired brain to enjoy this wild carnival ride of life.  But also with evolutionarily developed limitations, as we push up against our edges and hopefully evolve for the future. We will never get this exactly right. Our job is to notice, prepare, and keep showing up. Beating ourselves up for not finishing the to do list is counter productive and can limit our enjoyment and impact on the social causes that are our focus. 

Check alignment with the big picture. Do you have your themes and principles written out? Are they aligned? If not, work to create alignment. If they are aligned, but you didn’t get everything done on the to-do list that week, write down why it happened. Realize some learning from the situation, then put those notes away and go outside and enjoy the time with family, friends and the wider world. 

We can create freedom from our to-do lists right now. This freedom is not conditional on completing a set of actions to feel worthy and good about ourselves each day or week. We are totally fine worthwhile human beings, with or without completing our to-do list. Our happiness and well-being does not depend on checking those boxes. We check the box on that in advance. This is a mindset that we can practice every day.  Our to-do lists do not determine our value; they are tools

Strategies 
Begin by aligning expectations with reality. Dial back the list based on travel and estimated time for each issue area. For example: I had work travel at the beginning of the week. I neglected to reduce the number of expected items on my list based on that travel, assuming that the time and space to get additional work done would magically appear. I was wrong,  and knew I should have done that reduction in expectation. Remember that the planning fallacy is real. Catch yourself falling into it, and dial back the number of things on the to-do list. 

Write out a list of things that must be done today, or this week. Prioritize these items with the priority matrix of urgent/important, and move to the not urgent, but important part of the spectrum. 

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Tactics
Reset algorithm - Work seems like a constant process of setting a clear goal, and then having the rest of life push us off that path. We need a way to consistently reset our focus. Keeping a list of specific activities and steps that help us refocus can assist with  getting back on track.

 My reset process looks like this:

1. Realize I’ve lost focus on what I'm trying to accomplish
2. Walk away from the task. This could be a walk around the room or outside for a moment.
3. Come back to the task and remember why we are working on this task. How does it align with our big picture goals? 
4. Write out a detailed set of steps to follow.
5. Just start. Don’t worry about finishing, or getting stuck, or anything else. Just start moving and forget the rest. This momentum often translates into full completion. If you don’t finish in the time that you had, then you have a good foundation for finishing later. 

Pomodoro - One of the high performance habits for aid workers, the Pomodoro Technique, gets its name from using a timer that originally looked like one of the oldschool tomatoes used as a kitchen timer. This technique has you set a timer for 22 minutes, when you begin focused work. Take a quick break by walking around every time the timer rings. Repeat several times then take a longer break.

Building in enjoyment of human nature
By luck or design, we have the chance to work on causes that matter to us and the world. Let’s start seeing the human brain and our work patterns as an amazing opportunity for creativity, enjoyment and impact. We can design our workdays to maximize the idiosyncratic human animals that we are. Understanding, enjoying and working with the quirks makes it more fun. 

Making it work for you
We have been discussing the general human tendency, but you are different. I am unique and so are you. How do you handle a task list? What are your individual quirks outside of the norm? How can we design your work  enjoyment process to use these individualized patterns to maximum effect?

Happy trails.

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