I was talking with the wonderful Ed Percival last week and he observed something interesting. In conversation I kept saying ‘I should do this’, ‘I should do that’. And I spoke about adding these ‘should dos’ to a list. ‘And maybe I should schedule time to do these things into the diary? 09.30, write blog post. 10.30, write proposal, 1.30 phone calls, 2.30 go for a walk, etc etc.’
Ed suggested that this to do list (or should do list!) is not very helpful. As it grows it becomes more off-putting, more likely to remain uncompleted, and more likely to create a sense of failure. I think he’s right, and this may be partly why I don’t currently keep many lists. He also wondered how I might approach these scheduled tasks if I schedule them as completed.
I’m dropping should from my ‘making stuff happen’ vocabulary, and yesterday I got a bunch of stuff done, some of it had been hanging around longer than I’d originally intended. And later this week I’m going to schedule completed tasks in the diary and see how that works. 09.30 blog post written, 10.30, proposal written, 1.30 pm phone calls made, 2.30, just returned from 2 mile walk.
I’ll let you know how I get on. Meantime, what ideas do you have for getting stuff done?