Practices

The cheapest place to deal with a task is before it ever reaches your list. Some things are better declined in the moment they are offered.

Once something is written down it starts costing you. It gets read, moved to next week, copied out again, felt guilty about. Filtering at the door…

Before a task you have been circling for days, give five minutes to moving your body. A brisk walk or a couple of flights of stairs is often enough to make starting feel less like pushing at a door that will not open.

Treat the movement as part of the task rather than something virtuous you do separately. The lift is short lived, so it helps most sitting right…

Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.

Worth testing instead of assuming. Take one task you always do sitting still and do it moving gently: read on your feet, take the meeting walking,…

Do not leave it to eleven at night to decide whether to close the tab. Set the block in the afternoon, while you are still the version of yourself who wants it set.

A browser extension that shuts certain sites between certain hours, a router on a timer, mobile data off after a set time. Pick one, set it once, and…

Planning does not really happen in your head. Until the week is written somewhere you actually look, you are guessing, however sincere your intentions are.

One calendar rather than four. Paper or phone matters far less than whether you will open it, so choose the one that appears in front of you without…

Urgent means the clock is pushing. Important means it matters to the life you are trying to have. In the moment the two feel identical, and they are not.

Take your list and put one letter beside each thing. U if something real goes wrong today when it slips, I if it moves you towards something you care…

The good place to be is where things matter but nothing is on fire yet. Booking the check-up, planning next term, getting the haircut before it becomes a situation.

None of it feels like an achievement, which is exactly why it gets no credit and keeps slipping. Try counting it as work: the dentist, the form, an…

Instead of guessing what pulls you away, catch it happening. Keep a scrap of paper beside you for a week and note whatever took you off, at the moment it takes you off.

Two words is plenty: phone, hungry, that noise, the thought about Saturday. The writing itself breaks the drift, so some of the benefit arrives…

Sort the work into hardest, middling and easiest, then choose the order on purpose. Easy first for momentum or hard first while you are sharp, both are fine. What is not fine is letting the most interesting thing win by default.

Write the three piles on paper and then pick. If you tend to run out of steam by three in the afternoon, the hard thing belongs in the morning. If…

Work, friends, games and news all happen on the same rectangle, so nothing in your surroundings tells you which one you are in. Software has to do the job the room used to do.

A blocker that shuts the usual sites during your working hours, a tracker that shows you afterwards where the time actually went, or a small app that…

Keep both tools, and settle in advance where each thing goes. The deciding is what wears you out, so make that decision once instead of forty times a week.

The rule can be a single line inside the front cover: if it has a time, calendar; if it has a deadline but no time, list. Then writing things down…

Some jobs never move because they were never yours. Somebody else wanted them and you wrote them down to be kind.

You can usually spot one: the item that has been copied onto three different lists and never once started. The trouble is not that the work is hard.…

For the item that never gets done, make an actual decision: cross it off, or find a way to genuinely want it. Leaving it sitting there is the only option that costs you every single day.

Taking it on often works through a person rather than through the task. You may not care about the paperwork, but you care about whoever is waiting…

Saying no accurately depends on a calendar you actually keep. You cannot check whether Thursday is free if Thursday looks blank when it is not.

This is what makes the fiddly work of maintaining a diary worth doing. Nobody keeps a calendar for the pleasure of keeping one. You keep it so that…

But what if I need it one day? The honest answer is that keeping it has a daily price. A list you cannot find anything in has stopped being a list.

The thing you might want once in two years is sitting on top of the thing you need on Thursday. That holds for a to-do list, a desk and a spare room…