Why To-Do Lists Fail Your Goals

I've had a nagging doubt or fear in the back of my mind for a number of months now, and that fear is really simple but really sinister, and it's, what if everything that I do from a productivity perspective is rooted in fear instead of ambition or hope? Hi everyone, my name is Matt Ragland and I create videos to help creators, makers, and entrepreneurs focus more on the work that matters so they can get the right things done and spend more time on the projects and people that matter the most to them. Them. This is kind of scary to me on a couple of different levels. One, I'm a very productive person, at least I like to think that I am, because I get a lot of things done. On another level, it's scary because my entire YouTube channel up to this point is built around productivity systems, to-do lists, project planning, goal setting. But to think that most of productivity is rooted in fear instead of hope, ambition, or positive intent is something that really kind of worries me. But I can't shake the thought that the reason I'm so compelled to get things done is because I'm afraid of what will be left of me when there's not an endless task list to take care of. Like, what would I really do if my mind wasn't so wrapped up in, I have to check off these boxes every day to feel like I, you know, am having a good day. I read an article recently in Wired magazine by Clive Thompson, and the title of the article is "Hundreds of Ways to Get Shit Done, But We Still Don't." It's about the design and also the psychology behind to-do list apps. Now, it could be something like Todoist. It could be building your own in Notion or Roam Research. He even quotes Ryder Carroll of The Bullet Journal Method about why to-do lists become so difficult and so tough for us to wrap our minds around. And the biggest and worst part of it is we become so afraid and so frustrated when we don't fulfill all of the things that we've set up in our mind or in our apps or on our papers to actually get done any particular day. Simply put, the problem with to-do lists and productivity planning is that we're afraid to not make the best use of, as Mary Oliver puts it, the one wild and wonderful life that we actually have. A to-do list is a promise to ourselves or an intention to get something done, obviously. But even more than that, we normally put together goals and to-do lists and projects in an attempt to become a better version of ourselves. I wouldn't even say it's a trap, but that mindset so often. If you haven't checked out Thompson's article, definitely check it out. It's linked in the description below. It is one of the most well-written articles on productivity that I've ever read and really gets to the heart of these mental, societal, psychological issues that often crop up when we are attempting to get things done. I want to give you a few different ways to guard against this negative mental loop that you can go down when it comes to making to-do lists and planning projects and setting goals for yourself. The first one is to have a really short feedback loop for what you intend to get done than what you actually end up doing. Now, one of the best ways to do this that I have found personally is with the gap preview and the wrap review. I have a full video about both of these concepts, but essentially you're going to set your goal for the week, the action steps that are, that make up that goal, and then protect time to do them. And then the wrap review, and you can do this every day or at least once a week. The wrap review is looking at the day and saying, what are my wins? Because that will give you helpful dopamine hit of like, wow, I did get some cool things done today. The results of your actions for the day. So if you think about what did I intend to do, what were the results of those intentions? And then the A is for alignment. So is the work that I'm doing, is the thing that I did today or this week aligning with the goals that I aspire to do either this week, this month, or this quarter. And then finally, the P is for pivot. And it's just pivoting the next day or the next week to say like, okay, I need to make a little change right here. I don't have as much time as I thought, or I have a little bit more time than I thought. This got done a little quicker than I expected. So I can make a little pivot in my schedule and in my task list going into the next day or the next week. Another thing that you can do that is related to the wrap review is to journal consistently. Even if you're not asking yourself those wrap review prompts of what were my wins, what were the results of my aspirations, are they in alignment with the goals and the kind of work that I want to be doing, what do I need to do to pivot going into the next day. Even if you're not using those as journal prompts, just reviewing the day and kind of talking back to yourself about the things that you're doing, how much time something took, time tracking can be really helpful here as well. Because this goes into another thing that can be really helpful, which is calendar blocking. And calendar blocking or time blocking is something that will help you better understand the duration of a particular task or project. Because one of the things that Thompson talks about, and we've talked about on this channel for months, if not years at this point, is when you understand how long something takes, you actually get more productive and more focused because you're not getting into this mental loop of like, Oh, I thought this YouTube video was going to take 2 hours. Instead, it took 6 hours. I didn't get it done, and now I don't know when I'm going to get it done. And I'm supposed to be publishing a video every week, but now it's going to be every 2 weeks, and it's still really stressful. All of those things are really challenging. But if you look at it and say, okay, I have 4 hours this week that I'm going to protect for my YouTube videos, for this project, for reading or writing or whatever you want it to be. When you protect time for a particular task and, and you stick to that time block, you stick to that time in your calendar, then you have given yourself permission at that point to actually work on the thing. Now, there's a whole other box of issues that can pop up right there. It's like, what if I get interrupted? What if there's other things that have a higher priority? Those are all other things, other problems to be untangled maybe in another video. But at this point, we're still trying to move ourselves out of a fear, a fear-based productivity of what if I'm not going to get enough done? What if I'm not going to achieve greatness in this one wild and wonderful life that I have? What we're doing instead is unpacking the things that really matter to us and setting aside, protecting time each day and each week to make sure that you're giving yourself permission to work on those things. This is a topic that I'm going to be spending more time untangling, but if you just focus on like those 3 pieces, that will help you become like more productive in a hopeful, intentional, courageous, positive way. Then I think you'll find that you go into each week and each day feeling more upbeat about what you can actually get done and align your actual ability with the things that you have to get done that week. To recap those 3 things, it's having a short feedback loop, either daily or weekly, and the thing that I like to use for that feedback is the gap preview and the wrap review. You can do it daily or weekly. The second piece is to have a, like, journal feedback loop for yourself. It can be quick. It can be just one sentence. It could be doing that wrap review. It could be just A couple of morning pages or evening pages. There's a lot of good journaling content on this channel that you can check out. I'll link to some of it in the description below. Finally, it's that calendar blocking, time blocking, because when you look at the projects that you have or the tasks that you need to do, and you actually like give them space on your calendar instead of churning through them endlessly in your mind, oh, I didn't get this done, or what about this? That way you can look at it and say, this thing that I'm a little worried about, I've given myself permission to work on it on Tuesday from 2 to 4 PM. And that way you can kind of take it out of your, you know, your busy short-term memory mind and just set it aside, metaphorically speaking, until it comes to that like time that you've blocked off in your calendar. The final thought that I want to leave you with is something that writer Carol talked about in this article by Clive Thompson. And what he says about paper-based productivity, analog productivity tools like the Bullet Journal, like the analog cards, like just writing things down in a Field Notes journal, is that the annoyance and kind of the repetitiveness of writing a bunch of things down over and over again in your Bullet Journal is a feature, not a bug. One of the most frustrating, kind of annoying, repetitive things in the Bullet Journal is like, oh, I didn't do that thing yesterday, so I got to write it back down again today. That's why I have kind of a master task list, but I'm still like writing those things back down. What you get to ask yourself every single time you write down a question or a task for the second, third, fourth, fifth time, you have an opportunity, and Carol talks about this in The Bullet Journal Method book. Every time you have that opportunity, it's a chance to ask yourself, does this really matter to me as much as I thought that it did? Because if you're writing it down, 3, 4, 5, 6 days or more in a row and you're not getting it done, you really get to ask yourself, does this matter to me? When you have digital apps, and there's a lot of great things about digital apps, but you write something down once and it's still kind of in your memory, but you don't necessarily have to look at it again. And you know, everyone knows you've had those times where something just kind of pops up, you stumble upon an undone task in like Roam or Notion or I Done This or Todoist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, any of those apps. And you're like, oh yeah, that thing. Now I feel bad. I never got that thing done. With the Bullet Journal, with paper, if you're writing things down every day, you literally have to wrestle with the question of, does this really matter to me? I've written it down 10 days in a row. Why haven't I done anything about it? It may take 10 days of writing it down to be like, oh, Actually, this doesn't matter to me as much as I thought. I'm just going to stop writing it down. It's going to be left undone. So that's the thought that I want to leave you with. Thanks so much for watching this video. Uh, please subscribe, rate, review. That's for a podcast, but subscribe, ring the bell, uh, for more videos about productivity, about mindfulness, about the creator economy and how makers get things done. I'm so happy to share all these ideas with you. If you have any thoughts or comments, please leave them below in the comments, and I'll see you in the next video. Thanks so much. Bye.