Your “To-Do” List – Is it a Tool or a Weapon?

How do you feel when you look at your to do list?

• Do you feel confident that everything is contained in one place, or do you wonder what’s missing?
  
• Do you feel clear about what to get started with, or do you feel overwhelmed at how long the list is?
  
• Do you feel a sense of accomplishment as you check items off throughout the day, or a sense of desperation as you watch the list grow throughout the day?

A to-do list is supposed to be an organizational tool, used to keep you productive, prioritized, and focused, and as a result it should greatly reduce your stress. But all too often I work with clients with to-do lists they want to hide from. The sense of overwhelm they experience as they see an unending list that can’t possibly be completed is enough to send them crawling back under the covers and take a sick day. If your to do list makes you feel bad and doesn’t help you work more productively, it may be a weapon you are using against yourself instead of the tool you originally created to serve you.

When facing your to-do list feels like facing an enemy, chances are it has become a trigger for negative self talk. If you listen closely to the words of your thoughts, you might notice things like, “I am so incompetent – I’ll never get all of this done”, or “what a loser”, or “this will take weeks and I’ll never get any time to relax and enjoy my life”, or “it’s useless, I can’t get on top of it – why bother doing any of it?” There are many variations in what you might be saying to yourself, but if the sight of your list triggers feelings of overwhelm, impatience, exhaustion, or other draining emotions, you can bet there is some form of negative thinking and self-talk behind it.

For many people, the energy drain is so severe that they avoid the list and procrastinate on tasks they might have otherwise enjoyed or easily completed. When that happens, your to do list has become a weapon you are inadvertently using against yourself, and it is no longer effectively serving its purpose as an organizational tool.

So, if this is happening to you, what do you do about it?

The first thing is to get back to the purpose of the to-do list. The to-do list serves you; you don’t serve it. Ask yourself why you have a list in the first place? Is it to keep you more organized, or prioritized? Is it to prevent you from forgetting things? Once you get clear on what you wanted the list for in the first place, you can make some adjustments to your list, or you can use an alternative tool that might work better. Here are a few ideas:

1. To keep you prioritized and productive: write a “top 5” list each day, of the five most important things you want to get done. There may be a longer to do list that you use to contain ALL your projects, but the top 5 is much less overwhelming, and keeps you focused on the 20% that will give you 80% of your results.
2. To move through your list faster: Most people know about the A,B,C method of prioritization. A items are the most critical items, B items are important, and C items are things you’d like to do when you can find the time. Add a Q designation for anything that takes 10 minutes or less and is relatively easy. Each day when you get 15 – 20 minutes of open time, such as before a meeting, knock one or two Q’s off your list. You might be surprised at how much shorter your list stays as a result.
3. To get rid of the overwhelm: The bottom line is that technology has changed the nature of work over the past decade such that it is now literally impossible to get everything on our lists done. The people who survive in this new age of information overload have changed their mindsets and expectations accordingly. It’s no longer “getting it all done” that is important. It’s choosing what’s most important now, given the current circumstances and opportunities in this moment, which may be entirely different from what was relevant just a moment a go. Shifting your mindset to a new way of judging your competence can be powerful. Instead of “getting it all done”, if “getting what’s most important done” is what makes you competent, your to do list may lessen its power over you, and go back to its rightful place as your servant.

I’ll be talking about this mindset change in my Calming the Chaos workshop November 17th. To see a list of workshops I’m currently offering, you can always visit my website at

www.aspyrre.com.

Our Endless Struggle with Time

All my clients struggle with time to some degree. At one end of the spectrum are those who work 18 to 20 hours per day and still can’t keep up with everything on their plates. They are exhausted, they don’t have time to spend on what they love, and they barely have time to talk with me. At the other end of the spectrum are those who have balanced their life, but still worry about protecting what they have achieved, as there are always opportunities to get lured into new commitments.

The time struggle goes deeper than balancing your “to do” list with hours in the day. Americans are addicted to productivity, and sometimes we get our identity from how much we are able to get done in a given time frame. Have you ever had one of those super-productive days and felt a “high” afterwards from the pride in how much you accomplished?

Then there’s the whole problem with everything you do stretching into the available time. You might remove things from your to do list, only to find that you still don’t seem to have time to get everything done.

I did a time management seminar at a client facility recently, and one of the key things we focused on are what I like to call “the underneath issues”. These are the underlying emotional things that prevent you from feeling comfortable in a “non-busy” state. Here are just a few:

1. Trust: If you worry that something catastrophic will happen if everything isn’t handled, then you will constantly fill your plate monitoring everything within your conscious reach that may go wrong. Even if you get more efficient, your empty time will be filled worrying, and you will create new things to worry about.

2. Identity: If your sense of self is attached to how much you can accomplish in a day, then you will constantly be driven to add as much as you can squeeze into the available spaces. It seems silly, lazy, or unproductive to allow yourself empty time, so if you find that you have 15 extra minutes, you will be compelled to squeeze something else in.

3. Connection: If you have a strong desire to have positive relationships with other people, you may have a difficult time saying no to invitations and requests for your time. You may also have a hard time closing down your e-mail or turning off instant messenger, as you wait to hear from people you care about.

It’s not just internal issues that keep us busy. Productivity, hard work, speed and efficiency are among the most important values in business today. And with the influx of technology into our social lives, we have several times as many opportunities to get involved in community activities. No matter how committed you are to living a peaceful life, the world around you will continue to buzz with activity and invite you “out”.

The bottom line is that changing your “time situation” involves more than learning new time management techniques. It requires you to examine your underlying values, and pay attention to how NOT having enough time serves you. Only when you can pinpoint what compels you to stay busy or overwhelmed can you rise above your frustration and make significant decisions that will change your life.

Copyright ©2008 Nahid Casazza, Aspyrre, www.aspyrre.com