The Daily Hustle
I am a list builder.
I break projects down into their most granular tasks and write them down in a to-do list on an old school scrap of notebook paper. If you look around my desk, folded and tucked neatly reused as bookmarks into books on my shelf, and in my round file cabinet (aka the trash), you’ll find them everywhere.
Using to-do lists is reinforced everywhere on the web. The tech industry, in particular, is obsessed with the cult of productivity and to-do lists. There are posts on the 5 best to-do list managers, not-to-do lists, and there are apps for that.
The Problem With To-Do Lists
For each area of my life there became a list. Chores around the house. Workouts. Client projects. My own websites. General family stuff. It evolved into stacks of tiny paper monsters hounding me for all that I hadn’t gotten done, regardless of what I had accomplished.
When your life lists get too big it dilutes the positive association of forming a list in the first place: crossing items off.
Coupled with the time I was spending writing down things I wanted to do, it became clear that the action of writing them down was just another form of analysis paralysis.
