What To Do When Your To Do List Never Ends
Accept there is always more to do, prioritize constantly, and set boundaries on your time
How does your to do list look these days?
Does it seem like you cross one thing off, only to be inspired by something that makes you add 17 more things to do?
I know this happens to me. At home and at every job I’ve ever been at. The backlog of things to do just keeps growing faster than we can keep up. It’s no wonder we can feel stressed, burned out, and hopeless at times.
In order to stay calm and carry on in the face of a mountain of tasks you must:
Recognize that your to do list will NEVER be finished
Prioritize constantly
Set boundaries
The rest of this post will dive into each one of these ideas.
Your To Do List Will Never End
This is OK. There will always be more to do. The first step is just fully recognizing and accepting that you will never magically be “done”.
At work this often looks like a growing backlog of JIRA tickets that start to resemble a pile of “nice-to-have” features or quality of life improvements. These will end up sitting in the backlog the whole time you work there. You’ll change jobs or teams and eventually most of those tickets will just be deleted. That’s OK.
At home there’s a list of things you’ve written down to do and then there’s a mental list of things you’ll start thinking about once those are done. This sometimes manifests as life style creep. Once you finally redo the bathroom, after a few days (or hours) of appreciating it, you find yourself thinking, ‘hmm, maybe we should repaint the bedroom now’.
You’ll never reach a place where you feel like everything is done. There will always be something next. Even if your to do list right now has an end, something will be added once you get through it.
This is OK, just accept and recognize this reality. Then instead of racing to get everything done, the game becomes one of prioritizing your finite resources.
Prioritize Constantly
Once you understand there’s always more to do, you can free yourself from the burden of doing it all and focus instead on what’s most important.
We each are constrained by a finite set of resources. Money, energy, and most importantly time. What you choose to spend your limited resources on doing is a reflection of what you value. By allocating your limited resources like time to a task, you are deeming that task more important than the others. The goal is to do this allocation consciously so that the task you are spending resources on, is truly deserving of it over your other tasks.
Since there will always be too much to do, you know you will never do all the things you want. You therefore, must be very selective with what you do spend your time, energy, and other resources on.
You need to constantly prioritize what you are choosing to focus on. This can be as simple as asking ‘is this task the most effective use of my time right now?’
As a Staff engineer, this is a huge part of my job. The more senior you are in tech (or anywhere), the more ambiguous your job description, the more you need constantly evaluate what you are spending your time on. At work, my Director gave me the heuristic to think ‘would my boss think this is a good use of my time?’
Before doing something, ask yourself if this task is high value based on whatever is most important in the realm you are in. When you focus on high value tasks you’ll get a higher return for your spent resources. Over time these higher returns add up.
Set Boundaries
We know our to do list will never end, so we shouldn’t try to get it all done before we go home. Pace yourself. Find whatever balance you need to sustain your level of performance over a lifetime. Because that’s what this is, a lifetime of choosing how to allocate your resources.
Your work life is a series of never ending tasks that you need to constantly prioritize so that your getting the best return you can for the finite resources you invest in doing something.
The only way to sustain high performance is to not burn yourself out in the process.
Set a cap on how much of your time and energy you will spend in a given day on getting stuff done. Leave some space for self-care, being a parent or friend, and for enjoying your time away from being productive.
In practice this can be time-boxing an open-ended task by setting a timer and simply stopping when time is up. It can also just be ensuring you leave the office by 5pm everyday and turning your Slack off. Or if you find yourself hitting a wall and getting frustrated, just step away to recharge rather than force yourself forward.
Recap
We all have a never-ending task list. Accept that you won’t be able to do it all so that you can focus instead on prioritizing what’s important. Focus your energy and time on these tasks and then stop when your day is done. Come back tomorrow and repeat.
I’m curious to know, is your task list never ending? How do you deal with too much to do? How do you set boundaries on your day so you come back tomorrow able to do it again? Reply to this e-mail or comment on the page. Thanks!