Why Daily To-Do Lists Don’t Get Anything Done.
A little Twitter flex last week, a little freaking out this week.
It's called balance, baby.
The image above is an actual image of myself after the short-lived dopamine hit I received when I fired my client last week. (Have you ever had to do this? Terrifying. I'll share how I navigated the situation next month when I share the tools I've been using to manage my clients.)
This morning I took a glance at my credit card's spending limit and started scrambling to dust off four-week-old leads with follow-up emails. Sales, my friend, is not my soft spot. Still, I don't regret it. The ebbs and flows of this biz are real and I am JUST getting started, but I was raised by sales-people. These ebbs and flows are familiar.
With that being said, it's fucking Monday and we're back at it again.
Here's why I start my Monday's the way I do.
Daily to-do's don't get anything done.
Have you ever looked through your journal and seen countless unfinished to-do lists? That's because daily to-do lists don't help get things done.
Before you unsubscribe, I love to-do lists. Skeptics can read the reasons why they are beneficial somewhere else, but what I mean to say is that daily to-do lists don't encourage you to get the right things done. You never finished crossing those tasks off on those lists because those tasks were never that important, parts of a longer process, or seen as optional.
Once I recognized this, I started writing weekly-goals every Monday morning. I grab a pen and paper and write down my weekly-goals across all my projects. These are non-negotiable tasks that, unlike daily to-do lists, will get done. Why? Because these lists include overarching objectives that are going to help take the project to the next level.
While you may have time to lose in-between days (daily to-do lists), something about losing productivity time over a matter of WEEK's feels a lot scarier. Not completing the tasks on this list will have real consequences on your projects in the long term that you can feel and, more importantly, are too scared to find out. (PS- why must the stakes be this high? We're really out here living on the edge.)
An integral part of this is to use language that influences your behavior. In the past, I used to write arbitrary goals like "reach out to x number of people" or "finish x software training." Those tasks didn't match my end-goals. They were moving parts that would eventually help move things along, but I realized I cared more about crossing those tasks off than actually completing the project. It was easy for my mind to manipulate me into editing the specifics later on when I was feeling terrible that I hadn't completed my to-do list.
Now I point to the desired outcomes:
"Schedule a meeting with x"
"Create a v1 draft using x software"
These weekly goals are specific to people, places, and deliverables.
Daily to-do lists have their place, but weekly goals help keep you stay on track and remind you that you're not working for the sake of working. You're working to get x done.
Do your to-do lists motivate you or are you motivating them?
Stay friendly + curious,
Val