I read a great article recently by Ozan Varol called “The to-do list trap”. Here, he laid out a typical “to-do” list with 6 items – except the items varied greatly. For instance, one was “order groceries” and another was “write book”. Clearly the former could be achieved within 30 minutes, whereas the latter is a huge project that could never be completed within a day, week or even month.
With a to-do list like this, a few things happen;
- We seek out the easiest tasks to do – we all want that dopamine hit of crossing something off the list!
- In general, those easiest tasks are the least important tasks. So while we might feel accomplished as we check things off, we’re not making progress towards things that will move us to the next level.
- We can never finish our to-do list in a day, week or month. Eventually this leads to a feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration. We lose trust in ourselves to do hard things, and ultimately this loss of confidence makes it even harder to do hard things.
So what to do?
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