The to-do list gap
The time goes by whether we pay attention or not. (Image by nile)
From middle schoolers to experienced executives, I have seen the same challenge: We put ourselves last.
We show up where we’re supposed to show up, which is almost always at someone else’s behest, whether it’s math class or a client meeting.
Then, we tend to do the stuff that’s in front of us. For some of us, it’s eating snacks and playing video games; for others, it’s answering emails and phone calls.
Either way, we might get to the end of the day and find that we’ve neglected what’s most important — the actions that will move us toward the future we desire for ourselves. How does this happen?
It’s pretty simple: We put stuff on our schedule — our calendar — when it involves someone else. And we often neglect to treat our commitments to ourselves the same way.
In order to accomplish a particular task, we have to commit to doing it. We might put it on our to-do list, but that’s only part of it. We must then:
estimate how long the task will take, and
book the necessary time on our calendar on a particular date (or series of dates).
So many of us miss this. It’s the reason people get zeros on school assignments, quit studying a musical instrument or a foreign language after just a few weeks, and don’t finish the online courses they sign up for. They haven’t done the hard work of figuring out how their commitment will manifest in their life, so the follow-through doesn’t happen.
If we actually want to succeed, we’ve got to get the key tasks on the calendar. We’ve got to close the gap between the to-do list and reality.
Our mornings might look something like this:
But obviously, the time passes and we spend those blank spaces doing something. If we were to track our time, our calendar might look a bit like this:
All that checking of email and Slack might actually be productive time. The time spent browsing social media and chatting with colleagues could be fulfilling social time, too. The trouble is that we didn’t decide in advance how we would spend our time, leaving us wondering where our mornings went and frustrated that we are falling behind on our work projects, our studies, and our commitments to ourselves.
The key to solving this is to be intentional about what we are doing and when. To improve our outcome, we can book our time more thoroughly, taking into account not only our fixed appointments with others (shown in yellow) but our appointments with ourselves (shown in green):
Now, we’ve made time for study, writing, foreign language learning, a key work project, and some other to-dos that had been neglected in the previous version.
Note that we’ve spent a lot less time on email and Slack, but these routine tasks can be bumped to the afternoon when we might be less fresh. Additionally, we can compress these tasks into specific, shortened time frames so that we can be more efficient. Checking email, in particular, so often consists of listlessly opening and closing existing emails that we don’t want to deal with — it is the type of work that expands to fit the time available unless you curtail it. Likewise, social media should be time-bound. For best results, set a timer. (Or quit forever.)
I hope you can see how moving to-dos like “call Amy back” and “do research for TPS reports” directly to the calendar increases the likelihood that they will get done. If you choose instead to stand in the hall and chit-chat with a colleague during that time (remember when we got to see colleagues in person and chit-chat with them? That was so great), you will know exactly what is being bumped and what will need to be rescheduled. It also helps you get out of those awkward conversations (remember when we had to see colleagues in person and chit-chat with them? Ugh). “Oh, you know what, I am supposed to be doing my research for those TPS reports right now. Gotta go. Nice chatting!”
You will also be much more likely to work on long-term projects like learning a foreign language or writing a book if you schedule the time to work on them directly on your calendar instead of leaving them on a to-do list. In the schedule above, we spent 2.5 hours learning French and 2.5 hours writing over the course of the week. That’s infinitely better than the week where we left it to chance and did nothing.
Yes, taking the time to transfer your to-dos to your calendar takes time in itself. This planning time is part of your workweek and can be scheduled directly on your calendar each week, too. Planning your planning — how meta is that? But that’s what it takes.
Using our time with intention can be a lot of work and cause us to miss out on fun things. But our lives begin to transform when we are living our days in alignment with what we want for ourselves. We’re putting ourselves — our higher selves — first. When our long-term goals begin to take shape in our actions, we can experience a greater satisfaction than we feel when we have all that white space on the calendar but little direction about what to do with it. Then, when we truly do have free time, we can relax and enjoy doing whatever we feel like doing in the moment. We’ve earned it.
