To-do lists can be stress busters – if you can master them
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Version 0 of 1. If anyone’s to blame for the modern-day cult of “personal productivity” – the ceaseless barrage of books and listicles promising tips for keeping your head above water in our hyper-busy era – then it’s probably David Allen. It’s been 14 years since Penguin published Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, with its inauspicious cover image of Allen in his business consultant’s boring suit and tie, smiling affably; within a few years, his philosophy – and it is a philosophy, perhaps even a religion – had proved a surprise hit among Moleskine-toting hipsters and Silicon Valleyites, not just the corporate types at whom it was aimed. (I’ve used some version of it for years now.) Much productivity advice, of course, is utter rubbish – at worst, just a way of feeling slightly less bad about working ever-longer hours at meaningless jobs to line other people’s pockets. But Allen’s ideas aren’t like that. Perusing the just-released new edition, I’d say his recipe for beating overwhelm remains better than anything anyone’s concocted since. The core problem with modern-day “knowledge work”, in Allen’s view, is that it never feels like it’s finished. (Compare, say, life as an eighteenth-century candlemaker: have you made today’s quota of candles? Then you’re done.) There’s a vast list of tasks we could do, an infinite number we could do, and a zillion other “open loops” – emails needing answers, books you should probably read, meetings ending with vague commitments to follow things up – which all produce subconscious stress. Our brains try desperately to keep abreast of them, but chronically fail – not surprisingly, since the number of items we can hold in working memory, it’s been argued, may be somewhere around seven. Yet as James Fallows wrote, in a hymn to Getting Things Done, published in the Atlantic in 2004, the brain that can’t remember perversely also can’t forget: At some deep and not very efficient level it is always stewing about the things you should have done but haven’t, and it tends to remind you of them at the worst time – typically, 3am. On this theory, much of our stress comes not from having too much to do, but from trying to keep track of it all. Which explains why, when you’re feeling so overwhelmed that you finally sit down, grab a pen and make a list, you experience immediate relief – even though the tasks you’ve just listed remain as unfinished as before. You’ve offloaded the job of remembering them to an “outboard brain”, permitting your actual brain to relax a little. If you really want the state of relaxed, stress-free alertness that Allen calls “mind like water”, though, scribbling the occasional list won’t cut it. You need a “trusted system”: a single notebook or Word file or smartphone app where you list everything on your plate – every commitment you’ve made, every vague project idea you’ve had, every nagging task you’ve yet to complete. (You could carry a small notebook or stack of index cards on which to dump these as they occur, then transfer them to the master list later.) I know, I know: this all sounds like a huge hassle. But when you actually do it, the idea of trying to manage without it seems like the act of an especially self-loathing masochist. Oh, and the items on that list should be “physically doable next actions”. This is another key commandment from the high priest of productivity: often, things are left undone because you haven’t figured out the specific actions required in order to do them. You can’t “do something about your toothache”, but you can call your dentist; you can’t “heal your relationship with your estranged Uncle Horace”, but you could write him a letter. There’s far more to Allen’s system – indeed, for many people, implementing it in full may be more trouble than it’s worth. (As Fallows notes in a foreword to the new edition, a great strength of the system is that it doesn’t rely on self-help’s usual all-or-nothing, “change everything now!” approach; you can just pick what works.) Still, if I had to choose the single insight from Allen that’s helped most to make my life less stressful than it otherwise would be, it’s his “two-minute rule”: if some task enters your orbit that will take less than two minutes to complete, just do it now. If you’re the kind of person who disdains the whole notion of “productivity systems”, I suspect you just emitted an extremely loud sigh of derision. Just get on and do stuff: who’d have guessed it? But for me, the two-minute rule has been a lifesaver: it’s genuinely astonishing how a to-do list item can linger on the mind for hours, even weeks or months, gradually accumulating a crust of anxiety or irritation, when it could be done – dispatched! gone forever! – with a mere 120 seconds’ effort. Indeed, I suspect you can easily think of one or two such items that have been weighing on your own mind for at least a few days. Right? So go and do one of them. Now! Go. Go on! Why are you still here? |