Why You Should Limit Your To-Do List

It’s Monday afternoon, and you realize you’ve barely accomplished anything on your to-do list. What happened and why?

Well, if you’re like most normal people out there, you don’t actually get to tackle most of the things on your list. You opened your inbox to a flood of emails all demanding your attention, or you were going through your day just to find until you got another migraine.

Most business owners have a to-do list the size of Mont Blanc threatening avalanche on a near weekly basis. Every aspect of running a business requires its own list of tasks, all of which need doing yesterday, and none of which you have enough energy for. 

So what do you do? Find a new task manager? Automate with AI? No, the answer is you need to work within your own human limitations.   

Your to-do list should match your limitations.

There’s no shame in admitting that you can’t do everything. Anything else is lying both to yourself and to everyone else. So, let your list match your limitations. You can do only so much in one day and that day doesn’t always revolve around your to-do list.

You can wake up in the morning and plan to get that project done completely, only to get derailed when your company’s email gets hacked.

True story, by the way. 

Life doesn’t check your availability for a mild, life-changing disaster. No one in January 2020 expected what happened in March 2020. Well, I had my suspicions. You don’t lose important cultural figures like Christopher Tolkien and Terry Jones within a week of one another without something seriously sinister brewing.

So, if you already know you can’t get everything on your list done in one day, why are you assuming you can? The definition of insanity is continuing to do what doesn’t work. Besides, when you look at your endless list of tasks that never seem to decrease, it doesn’t feel very good, does it? 

Past business practices which guilt people into practically selling their souls to keep their jobs need to end. Small business owners and entrepreneurs have a huge opportunity to help drive this change by offering an alternative. But offering that alternative starts with you. 

If you want to create a business that doesn’t treat its employees like robots, then start by not treating yourself like a robot. 

And if you think an AI robot will lessen your to-do list, remember that it still needs input from a human––another task for your to-do list.

Smaller lists = Bigger dopamine hits

One thing I’ve found in my career is that the longer your list, the more overwhelmed you feel. You must be a very specific personality type and hyper disciplined to feel more powerful with longer lists. 

I am not one of those people. Neither are most people I know. 

Decision fatigue, according to the American Medical Association (AMA) is what happens when your brain becomes overwhelmed with the number of decisions it has to make throughout the day. You can only make a limited number before the quality of your decisions declines drastically. Worst-case scenario is you stop deciding entirely and zone out the rest of the day.  

If you have a long to-do list, do you really think you’re going to be able to do any of those things

Which means you’re right back where you started the next day, and the same tasks you keep saying you’ll get to never actually get done. Doesn’t feel very good, does it?

So, imagine the dopamine hit you get when you finish your entire to-do list one day? Well, if you limit your list, then you get to find out! I tried this out a couple of weeks back, and not only did I get everything done every day, but the effects were cumulative.

The trick was to maintain a limited to-do list and to not over-do it one day just because I felt energetic. You’re pacing yourself, not sprinting to the finish line. 

Smaller lists help you handle longer tasks.

There is a claim to-do lists allow us to choose the shorter, easier tasks over the longer ones because we’re constantly looking for that “hit” of dopamine to feel accomplished. I’m just as guilty of picking the easy tasks to do over and over instead of the more difficult ones. We’ve all done it at one point.

So, instead of ditching the entire list, shorten it to what you can reasonably do. If you have a day where you need to devote more time to a particular task, then don’t clutter that day up with extra tasks.

Not only does this force you to choose the longer tasks, but it makes you feel you have more time to perform longer processes.

A friend of mine makes handmade soap in her business. Each batch of soap has to “cure” for at least a month before it’s ready to sell. The days she’s in production mode for her soap, she spends most of the day on the soap itself. The curing process allows other tasks that don’t take as long as the actual soap-making.

So, smaller to-do lists on days when you have longer tasks to do automatically makes sense just from a time management standpoint. But, the smaller to-do regularly makes you consistently feel you’ve accomplished something.

I’ve experienced the same thing in writing. To get any significant amount of work done on my novel, I have to block out about a third of my day to do so, if not slightly more. It’s very labor intensive and there are things you have to check and then recheck to make sure you don’t have as much to correct later on.

But the key is keeping my to-do lists short so that I can devote that amount of time to the process.

Shorter lists force you to confront your priorities.

Your priorities matter too, and the moment you pretend they don’t is the moment you lose control. This not only negatively affects your business, but you lose sight more easily of the reason you got into business. It’s tempting to think that your priorities and your business’ priorities should be the same. Or, worse still, that everything is a priority. That’s not the case. You are a person. Your business isn’t.

A sick relative in the hospital is more important than you going viral on TikTok. Or getting your blog post up for that day. Your child needing your help with homework takes priority over a customer who could find the answer to their question in your FAQs.

When you create your daily to-do list, part of what you must do is keep in mind your own priorities: 

• What do you ultimately want from your business? Be specific here! You can’t just say “I want to make more money”–that’s not specific enough. 
• What part do you love the most? 
• What part do you hate the most?

For one of my clients, it was a matter of getting someone who could monitor the accounts and pay the bills, and that’s exactly what I do. I monitor certain accounts, pay the bills, and do much of the back-office stuff that keeps them going. This way, they could spend more time in the field getting business and less time in the office. 

So, if you’re having problems with your to-do list, don’t shrug your shoulders and resign yourself to the “well, it has to be done” attitude. Critically evaluate what’s on your list and only put the things on your daily lists you can reasonably do and align with what you want to do. Delegate everything else as much as you can. 

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