Let’s talk about to-do lists!
Love them? Hate them? Carry one like an albatross around your neck?
If you’re like most people I know, you loOoOove the feeling of checking something off your list…but you haAaAate the fact that you never cross off EVERYTHING.
Cause let’s be honest…that unfinished shit WEIGHS on you. It drags you down. It makes you question your worth. It’s a festering swamp of anxiety that taunts you at night, as you lie in bed with your brain racing and adding up all the things you have yet to do, yet somehow (yikes!) forgot to put on your list.
I think a lot of us set up our to-do list in a way that primes us to feel like an unproductive failure. So I want to share a bit about the right way to craft a to-do list so that it helps you feel productive and accomplished at the end of your workday.
For a long time, this habit of over-promising and under-delivering to MYSELF was one of my biggest sources of misery and frustration. I always wanted to tackle more than I could achieve in any realistic sense. I constantly desired to be doing more and accomplishing more and achieving more. Which is very unhelpful if you think about it.
I understand the longing to experience that sweet hit of dopamine: the rush that comes with crossing a project off my to-do list and feeling like I have leveraged my brain and creative capacity to its fullest. I’m deeply addicted to the experience of getting things done, especially things that could theoretically help me create more of what I enjoy about my current life.
But the reality is, if you are like me, and you are constantly overpromising to yourself, you’re setting yourself up to feel terrible pretty much all the time. Because you’re always going to feel like no matter what you do, you haven’t accomplished enough.
We are already getting bombarded with messages from the world outside of us that we should be buying more, achieving more, feeling better, and winning at life constantly, as though any of that was a realistic standard for us to hold ourselves to. We don’t need extra pressure from our own misguided ambition.
So what do you do about it?
If you find yourself caught in this loop of always having too much on your to-do list and feeling like you’re never accomplishing enough, it drains your energy, zaps your mojo, and makes you even less likely to accomplish anything in the first place. You can’t enjoy a feeling of satisfaction once you actually do accomplish something. When this happens, you need a game plan.
You need a concrete way to break yourself free from the cycle of overpromising and inevitably underdelivering.
That means setting aside some time to think critically about what you’re choosing to do and why, and getting fairly ruthless with yourself about what you can actually accomplish. Do not reflect in the lofty aspirations of your high achiever brain, but in the cold hard reality of your physical body, with all of its need for things like food, sleep, laughter, play, and downtime.
Yes, our machines are available to us 24/7, and yes, we see more and more AI tools that make the idea of endless creativity and productivity possible. But as long as you are having a human experience here on earth, your flesh and blood are going to put some limits on what you can do: that’s not a bad thing.
In fact, when you take the time to consciously decide what you can handle and intentionally do less, you will access more of the dopamine hit that you’ve been wanting to feel, and regain that addictive feeling of accomplishment. You’re actually allowing yourself the space to feel the success of getting things done in addition to hustling all the time.
Before I get into the specifics of how you can map out your game plan for yourself, I want to share a real example from my own life.
When my son was about a year old, he started getting really mobile, and my husband, who up until that point had been occasionally tapping in for daytime babysitting, went back to work full-time outside the house. What that meant was that I no longer could do work like I had been doing. I simply didn’t have my hands and attention free for long enough to work on my computer.
While we were still in the newborn and nonstop nursing phase, I got very good at typing one-handed during our epic breast-feeding sessions, and at least accomplishing certain tasks and idea-generation activities on my phone. But when the baby was walking around and getting into things where he could hurt himself, and I no longer had any daytime support, all bets were off.
I quickly discovered that I could not accomplish nearly as much of my own work as I had been able to achieve up until that point. I couldn’t answer emails, I couldn’t read articles, or write constantly, and I couldn’t do the kind of brainstorming, mind mapping, and planning that my ADHD brain desperately needs to navigate the busy and complex demands of my daily life. I simply didn’t have the physical ability to work uninterruptedly anymore.
I staggered along for a few weeks in this weird limbo where I attempted to carve out 30 seconds here and 90 seconds there to type on my phone while my son was heavily occupied chewing on something that hopefully wasn’t an electrical cord.
The constant stop-start interruption of my thoughts was maddening to me, and by the time I laid him down for a nap, I was so exhausted and my brain was so splintered that I didn’t have the patience or the desire to get back into anything. Sometimes I’d knock out a lot of work, but more often than not, I was just irritated and unmotivated. I found myself resenting the time I had to spend with my child because he was such an interruption from the mental and intellectual work I was trying to do.
That’s when I realized I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to give up. I had to surrender my ambitions for adult productivity. I had to get okay with spending all of my time parenting and doing stuff around the house instead of stuff that required long-term planning, strategy, or creativity. I had to allow myself to become a mom who moved at the speed of her toddler—thereby freeing myself to enjoy spending time with my child instead of constantly splitting my attention and making myself miserable.
Deciding to focus only on my child and stuff we can do in our house, on the playground, or out in the world and answering the occasional text message or phone call (usually not even phone calls let’s be honest) is the best choice I have made in terms of my ability to enjoy parenting. Yes, it’s been hard for me to accomplish as much as I used to. But that’s a small price to pay for the joy that I feel in becoming truly close to my child and spending time with him in this incredible season of life where he wants to be with me and I want to be with him, and we get to discover the world together.
This is where I am meant to be right now, and this is the season of life that I’m in.
Occasionally I get frustrated because my high achiever ambitious self throws a tantrum, but we have daycare now, so I have time to accomplish things and think as an independent adult. And most importantly, I’ve learned the lesson of not trying to do too much because it would rob me of the joy of everything in front of me.
So that’s what I want for you. I want you to have the ability to recognize the season of life that you’re in and to make accommodations for the physical, emotional, and mental needs of your current reality before trying to accomplish everything you can imagine on your list. Doing this upfront work is one way to break free from the cycle of constantly trying to do too much and give yourself back the pleasure of the life that’s right in front of you.
Now let’s talk about how you can do it.
Step 1: Make your usual to-do list—but call it a brain dump.
Go ahead and let yourself spill out alllllll the things you want to accomplish into your journal, digital notebook, or a piece of paper.
Get it all out of your head and stop carrying them around with you. Allow the space to carry the weight of all those ideas, not your brain and heart.
Step 2: Take a deep breath and check in with yourself.
How do you feel about this list? Are you panicked at the size of your list? Is your brain already running in circles or attempting to start three things at once?
Before you dive in or get swept away by your thoughts, pause and acknowledge that you are not going to accomplish ANY of those things right now.
No matter how urgent things feel, you’ve set aside this time to do NOTHING—and unless someone is bleeding or something is literally on fire, you’re not experiencing true urgency at all.
Step 3: Zoom way out and determine what season of life you’re in.
In order to work with your well-being in mind, you need to look at your life from 25,000 feet.
It’s also important to recognize when your inner taskmaster is simply pushing you too hard or setting unrealistic expectations for you.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to notice what season of life you’re in.
Have you recently experienced any major transitions, like having a baby, dealing with a severe illness, or having any significant emotional or social challenges that pop up in your life? You could be caring for aging parents or children or just working in a tumultuous environment; all of these things can create an extraordinary level of pressure on you, and an extraordinary level of taxation on your energy, even if your brain says you “shouldn’t” be tired right now.
To give a concrete example, I just dealt with six straight weeks of nonstop illness. Most days I was so sick I couldn’t get off the couch, except when my toddler was home and I had to force myself to be functional. The longer these back-to-back illnesses went on, the more my brain began to protest my level of inactivity. I would get frustrated and bored by how little I was accomplishing.
Even though I knew that passively consuming TV or napping while my child was in daycare was the best use of my time and the quickest way to replenish my health, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly frustrated and drained by the fact that I couldn’t do anything. However, I knew it would have been a mistake to force myself to do more than I was physically able to handle during that time. The best I could do was reach out to friends and my therapist and ask for help and a space to vent about feeling so miserable and just do what it took to get through every day.
Thankfully, I’m coming out on the other side now, but it’s a helpful reminder that being busy to feel a sense of accomplishment is not always the solution, even when it feels like it might be. Sometimes your global need for rest and recovery is greater than your brain’s need to get shit done and feel accomplished.
Since you’re probably like me, I know that being passive isn’t the way you want to live your life. But if you don’t make time to rest and recover when you truly need it based on your season of life, you’ll continue to damage your health and further deteriorate because you never get a chance to give yourself a break in the end.
So yes, it’s a balancing act, and yes, it requires self-awareness and some new wants to make these decisions, but even if you feel like the way you feel today is never going to end, it’s not true. Tomorrow’s a new day and tomorrow could bring something completely unexpected or change what you’ve been waiting for, and you may finally turn the corner and move into your next season, whatever that might be for you.
To help you identify what season of life you’re in, it helps to think about it in terms of actual seasons.
Are the growing conditions of your life conducive to blooming and bursting forth with life like in springtime? Are you feeling strong and steady and cruising along with your maturing plans and habits like in the summer? Do you feel the urge to let go of some deadweight and stop carrying so much, to start slowing down like in autumn? Or is it time to go quiet and retreat, like plants and animals do in the wintertime?
Again, don’t just think about what your brain tells you that you should be doing in these moments, but think about the kind of support and the kind of challenges you have in your life in terms of growing conditions. Are you getting all the nutrients you need to thrive? Are you facing any unexpected obstacles?
Once you answer these questions, you can identify which season you’re in. So go ahead—name it: spring, summer, winter, or fall.
Imagine yourself as a plant growing in that season. Does this visual allow you to give yourself a little more grace with all you’re trying and wanting to do?
Step 4: Make an honest assessment of your current energy level.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much energy do you have right now?
How does your current energy level compare to the way you’ve been feeling lately? Is this a new level of tiredness? Are you sick? Are you experiencing any specific physical or emotional challenges that might be dragging you down? Conversely, if you’re feeling great right now, what does that feel like for you?
Step 5: Pinpoint what you need to boost your current energy level.
The next question is, why is this your current energy level? What’s draining or depleting you? Or, conversely, what’s giving you a boost?
If you’re feeling low or overwhelmed, consider a few factors that might be at play.
A lot of us have been taught to grind through every moment, no matter what, which leads to burnout and exhaustion. In my case (maybe in your case too), this habit can cause simmering resentment and a kind of knee-jerk avoidance to doing work that sounds hard, challenging, or unpleasant.
On one hand, it makes sense to want to avoid unpleasant tasks—obviously, because they require doing what’s hard instead of what’s easy. But on the other hand, people like you and me are fully capable of doing hard things in order to reap the short- or long-term rewards.
So when knee-jerk avoidance of difficult tasks became my new normal, I was able to recognize this not as a personality trait but as a natural, healthy resistance to my long-term habit of grinding and depleting my energy reserves. Like you, I live in a culture of toxic productivity standards, where we’ve been taught to dehumanize and devalue ourselves to produce more and more and more. Not only does this lead to a population full of stress and burned-out workers, but it also causes the buildup of resentment when we have to do any work at all.
The problem with that is that oftentimes doing work, especially the work that matters to us on projects that have meaning in our lives, is one of the fastest ways to boost our energy and feel more successful and satisfied in our lives. So if you like me, and struggle with a feeling of simultaneous burnout and resentment disguise, a refusal to do anything on your list without getting dragged into it kicking and screaming, I want to invite you to take an honest look at your energy patterns, and what season of life you’re in right now. Once you do, you can identify the variety of tasks you most need to incorporate for your ultimate health and success.
Something that took me a long time to figure out is the fact that having too much to do is not the only reason that people feel drained and depleted.
Sometimes, it’s not about the quantity of things on your to-do list, it’s about the type of things on your to-do list. You may feel more tired and rundown because you’re not doing work that matters to you or projects that have some meaning or achievable end that lets you get off on a feeling of satisfaction.
Oftentimes, we are working on projects with no definite angle. Things like raising children, working a job, or running a business, where the daily fluctuations are to be expected, and there’s no universal signal that you’re done and have completed a task satisfactorily. So what I would encourage you to do is notice if your current lack of energy is coming from a place of being run, ragged and burning the candle at both ends, or if it’s coming from a lack of satisfying projects, and a sense of accomplishment.
I’m sure we’ve all experienced the exhaustion that follows a long bout of doom-scrolling, TikTok binging, or re-watching New Girl for the third time from end to end. Just me?
There is something truly draining and depressing about passively consuming as a form of rest. When your body is full of energy and good health, sitting or lying down without enough physical or mental stimulation and a feeling of purpose baked into your day will wear you out.
So you want to determine the KIND of energy fix you need. It’s not so much about assuming that you automatically need to rest as it is about getting clear on what strain of your energy is the problem in the first place, and what the best cure might be for that situation.
Step 6: Choose the top 3 tasks or projects that serve your goals AND honor your reality.
Once you’ve identified what season you’re in and what will best serve your energy today, meaning, will you be best served by taking some time to rest or getting up and getting shit done, then you can go ahead and make your plans for the week.
I say the week because I have found that choosing just three tasks or projects for the week is the most effective and realistic way to plan my time as a working mom.
Everyone has more than three things on their do-list, but in terms of what you need and want to accomplish, for your health and the health of your loved ones and lives, it’s unrealistic to expect us to take care of it all. There are ongoing logistics and daily household tasks required for us to function and turn the wheels of the engines of our lives, and we still make time and energy for an additional 10 things a day just because we love to check off the list.
Instead, I encourage you to choose three focus areas for the week and then determine every day what steps you want to take to move forward on those.
When you’re choosing your three topics, this is where your awareness of your season and energy level is going to come into play.
If you’re in winter time and you’re feeling depleted, around a 3 on the energy scale, because you’ve been tackling lots of new creative projects at work, then one of your tasks or focus areas for the week must be some form of rest and recovery.
You probably will resist rest, but you might as well get in and prioritize this so that you can actually get it done and then move on with your life as opposed to constantly saving it for down the road and digging yourself in a deeper hole.
On the flip side, if you know you’re coming into energy, like spring, then you can pick three focus areas that require more creativity and more get-up and go; there is the assumption that you can take on the added projects on top of everything else without burning out. In springtime, especially, you may find that you’re ready to add in more projects and more tasks that require discipline and focus because you have a renewed sense of inspiration and energy to make things happen.
It is the same thing with summer because the other areas of your life are flowing on autopilot. For the most part, this can be a time when you amplify and expand on projects already started or add some new ones because you now have the capacity to do so.
Now it’s your turn! Carve out some time to slow down, look inward, and determine what you actually want your to-do list to look and feel like.
If these concepts are helpful, I’d love to hear what season of life you’re in right now or what ah-ha’s you’ve uncovered. As always, feel free to hit reply and let me know if I can support you in creating more ease and flow in your day-to-day life.
