Lisa Woodruff describes a productivity system built on completing 1–3 major tasks daily and choosing excellence over perfection. Excellence means focusing on the next actionable step and valuing done over perfect. She uses carrying towels from the stairs to the bathroom as an example of how small purposeful actions keep momentum and reinforce the habit of doing.
Chapters
I set out to do 1 to 3 big tasks every single day, things that I want to knock off my to-do list. And often by noon, I will have knocked most of those off, and I'll add more things. I, I get a lot done. I know I get a lot done. At the end of every day, I am amazed at how much I've gotten done. But I don't set myself up for failure for trying to be perfect at things. Excellence is taking the next It's not about having a perfect outcome. It's just looking at the next step that needs to be done, taking the action, and then figuring out what the next step is. The other thing that I found when I started striving for excellence is that done is better than perfect. Like carrying up the towels that are ready at the bottom of the stairs and hanging them up in the bathroom. Like even now when I walk by, I'm like, why don't the teenagers do that? And I know I need to teach them to do it. But then I also think, just do it. When I see towels at the bottom of the stairs now, I just grab them, walk upstairs, hang them up, walk back down. You know what? I've gotten exercise in. My house is organized and clean. I'm very grateful that I have so many towels for teenagers to keep them all, you know, all their body parts hidden from me. Love that. Love that part. It's done. There's none of this inner dialogue. Whenever I am trying to do something to be perfect about it, I spend so much time thinking about it. Talking to myself about it, preparing for it, versus just doing it. But when I act as a person of excellence, as a person of excellence, I just want to have this house well run and everybody have what they need to have. That means towels need to be carried upstairs and hung up. Now, this is funny. I have brown and red towels, and I like to hang them brown, red, brown, red, brown, red. And sometimes they don't get hung in that order. It is a little disconcerting. But I move on. So you can have perfectionistic tendencies when you're getting things done. I know that this conversation doesn't really have an action point. It doesn't really have an ending like, go out there and be excellent. I just want you to start thinking about for yourself the different feelings of acting in a perfect way Or acting in a way of excellence? How much of your time are you internally dialoguing with yourself over your own expectations on how your house looks, how organized different spaces are, how perfectly you do something? How much of your time is spent wasted on the thinking and not the doing? Sometimes in the doing, in the action, in the, in the walking it out, the perfect answer will come to you. A more excellent way will be revealed. And also, when you wake up in the morning and you have a couple of things on your list that you want to do, and you just go ahead and attack those with excellence, just doing the next thing you know how to do, you will get so much more done than if you try to perfectly do one thing every day.
