First things first: A process

I’ve been doing something new for the past month. It started because I watched this video from Peter McKinnon, who saw an Instagram post from John Grimsmo, who probably got it from a book on habits and/or productivity (my money’s on Atomic Habits, by James Clear). So you can see the line of progression can get pretty long for this sort of thing, but the fact is a good idea is a good idea, no matter how long it takes to get to you.

And this idea is pretty simple: Use a journal to write down your critical tasks every day.

Simple, yes. But I’ll confess, for years this idea was something I balked at. And it’s probably down to me not being big on “commitments.” Typical, right? But the thought of scheduling every minute of my day, instead of being able to freeform through it, always bothered me.

Of course, freeforming your way through every day has its downsides, too. For a start, if you don’t have any sort of schedule or plan, then you day tends to get soaked up by unimportant tasks. And for some people (I’m definitely one of these), when your day is filled with the unimportant, and you can see that there are important tasks piling up, well that just creates stress. It creates that feeling of “overwhelm.” It creates anxiety.

I’ve suffered from anxiety for the past few years. It’s relatively new in my life, but it’s definitely there. It started when I was in a job that I was… ok, I admit it, I was blowing this gig off. I was reporting in, doing the bare minimum, and taking home a paycheck. I was… (God I hate admitting this)… a slacker.

Oy.

I, the person who prides himself on his work ethic, who does everything possible to keep all the plates spinning, and even pick up the broken plates that drop and glue them back together so he can start spinning them again—I was slacking off.

It’s so humiliating.

But it’s worse than that. While I was screwing around and collecting a check for basically nothing, I started to feel something. It took awhile to realize what that something was, but when it hit me it hit me hard.

I felt guilty.

I have traced my anxiety back to that exact moment in time, and I realize that unequivocally that is the beginning, the start, the apex of it all. Before that time in my life I may have felt the occasional dread and the momentary panic of anxiety, but it was fleeting. It passed, leaving me to live a more or less even and unfettered life. But then, suddenly, things changed. I went from being blasé about everything to being genuinely and horrifically worried about it all. I worried about my income, my workload, my reputation, my future. All of it. All of the time.

That was also, I believe, the moment when I realized that I had to have a strong work ethic. That I could not cheat those who were paying me for my work. Not without consequences.

I live with those consequences even now. And they manifest in freakish, weird ways.

For a start, that guilt I felt? I feel it all the time now. When I’m not working on something. When I am working on something. When I’m working on something and I should probably be working on something else. When I’m working on the task I’m supposed to be doing.

Paid work or unpaid work. Professional work or personal work. During working ours or during free time. Guilt. Always guilt. Always anxiety.

I’m experimenting and testing and trying things, in an attempt to overcome that. And part of the process is figuring out exactly what triggers the feeling, so I can work out how to mitigate or eliminate it.

There’s a lot to explore there, and I don’t have time to do all of it in this one post. But what I can tell you is that part of the issue for me is basically “scope creep.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it essentially means that you can get overloaded by essential tasks, to the point of paralyzing your efforts altogether. In other words, when you have a project or task to complete, the sub tasks sometimes get so numerous and weighty that they derail you, and you finish nothing. Or, in my case, you feel guilty even as you somehow manage to get everything done.

You end up regretting and feeling anxious about the things you didn’t do, even if the list of to-dos is unwieldy and unreasonable.

Maybe you can relate.

As an author, task creep is a huge part of my daily life. Because frankly, there are just more things I could be doing to push my career forward, and a lot of them start to feel like things I should be doing.

The same is true for my role as Director of Marketing for Draft2Digital. I have lists and lists of things that we could and should be doing as a brand, and almost all of them require a ton of time to develop and implement. Everything from recording live streams to editing podcasts to recording and editing videos to writing blog posts to writing books on behalf of the company to writing emails and social media posts to doing interviews to organizing and planning and attending and speaking at conferences… GAHHHH!

But hey, that’s life, right? Every day is the firehose. There will always be more to do.

Open wide.

So having anxiety about all of it makes everything that much more challenging. And since I can’t really control the volume of work I have on my plate, I have to look at ways to at least tamp down that anxiety over it. One of those ways is to prioritize, and put “first things first.”

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, I first encountered it in the same place most people do, which was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s actually Habit 3 in that book. A classic.

There are a lot of ways to put that habit into practice, including using Covey’s tips for a “priority matrix.” They’re tried and true, and they work. But I’ve always been fond of lists. So lists tend to be the best approach for me (to be fair, I haven’t giving the whole matrix thing a fair shake yet—maybe I’ll try that out and report back).

So the thing I like about making a Critical Task list is that it can be a mix of the different silos of my life. I can have tasks that are centered on Draft2Digital, on my writing career, and on my personal life, and they each get their own priority. I like that. I also like that I get to use a journal for the process. I’m a big fan of journals, and I’ve secretly felt like I never use them properly. Another one of those weird hangups I have.

When I watched Peter’s video on this, he seemed to resonate with the whole journal idea, too. And he gave some reasons why he feels it’s better to put these lists down on actual paper with an actual writing implement, rather than use something digital like the Reminders app on your phone.

For a start, writing things down by hand does something different in your brain than tapping it onto the screen of your phone. It engages a different set of skills. And research shows that physically writing something down often makes the memory of it more “sticky.”

It also takes you out of your usual environment. Chances are you spend a fair amount of time staring at screens. I know I do. So being able to write something by hand makes it novel and unique. It makes it special.

I keep a bunch of Moleskine notebooks around. I have for years. I’ve kept them as daily journals for a very long time. Even when I fall out of the habit, I always eventually come back and pick up where I left off. These days journaling is one of my “first tasks.” I do it first thing in the morning, to start my day, and I feel out of sorts when I don’t make the time.

One of the Moleskines I’ve carried with me since the beginning of the year is a little “special.” It’s not meant to be a journal, per se. It’s more of an inbox for ideas, a place to sketch something I see in the world, a page I can fill with quotes or slogans I want to put on T-shirts, that kind of thing. I found that I wasn’t quite using it as much as I’d anticipated, though. So when this idea of jotting down critical tasks came along, I repurposed that notebook… slightly.

Here’s where things get interesting (for me, at least… your mileage may vary!).

Taking Peter and John’s advice, I started jotting down my critical tasks for each day. I made this 5 Critical Tasks—thinking that would make for a reasonable number of things that I absolutely must accomplish with my day. Five tasks, and they’re a mix of author, D2D, and personal priorities.

One thing I’ve done for years—and it’s something I utterly rely on—is put tasks on my calendar. “If it isn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t exist.” That’s always been my motto. And it works very well. I put everything on the calendar, and everything ends up getting done.

It just doesn’t always get done on the specific day where I put it.

Remember when we talked about task creep? This is where that starts. I go through my week with a flurry of tasks swarming into my brain, and to keep myself from losing any of them I drop them on the calendar. I try to pick the days I think I’d be most likely to be able to get them done, but more often than not I just end up having to move them to a different day. Which means they aren’t done that day. Which means (you guessed it) I feel guilty for not doing my work.

[Anxity arises. Lingers. Buys lawn chairs. Starts thinking about painting the walls.]

That has always bothered me, but if you really stop to think about it, what’s actually wrong with that approach? If I put something on the calendar for Tuesday, but Tuesday happens to get very busy, or one of my tasks happens to take longer than anticipated, what’s actually wrong with moving that task to Wednesday? And in fact, if Wednesday is already full, what’s actually wrong with moving the task to Thursday instead?

The answer is “nothing is actually wrong with it.” But that’s why anxiety is such an ordeal. Because logic has nothing to do with it.

I can reason that I’m doing the right thing, and doing nothing wrong. I can agree to it. But something, somewhere inside of me, isn’t having it. Some part of me still thinks I’m screwing off. WORK HARDER, TUMLINSON.

You starting to see how I write a half dozen books each year? As a boss, I’m a slave driver.

So though the calendar thing really makes my life possible, it’s missing a little something. And now I know, that something is my 5 Critical Tasks.

I won’t say that I don’t still get tinges of anxiety. I do. It plagues me. I’m learning ways to deal with it. But when I write down those five tasks, and then strike them off throughout the day, it just does something. It clears my cache, in a way. It makes me feel like I’m making progress. And in fact, I can look at the list and see that, yes, I did knock some things off. Big things. Important things.

So what about those days when I don’t actually have five critical tasks?

They happen. Sometimes it’s because I know that one particular task is going to take a huge chunk of time. I know that things are going to be a little skewed. Or I know that I’m maybe a little burnt out, and need to recover (this happens when I do conference stuff, or do a lot of virtual events).

On those days I may only put a couple of work tasks. Things that are important, that will move my career and life forward, for sure. But I maybe put fewer things on the day than I would have otherwise. And I put in some critical tasks that I sometimes forget to think about.

For example, for today, not only do I have “Write a blog post” on my critical tasks, I also have “Relax and enjoy yourself.”

That’s because we’re currently in a campground in Massachusetts, surrounded by families and activities. It’s been a long week, and I’ve gotten a lot done. I’ve been productive and efficient. And now, I need some wind-down time.

So this afternoon, once I’ve struck all four other tasks off of the list, I’ll close my iPad, take a walk, chat with the neighbors, and spend the rest of the day and evening letting everything fade into the background.

Because sometimes it’s important to make personal care the first thing.

So does this list help?

I’ve been using it for 30 days straight now. Out of those 30 days, there was only twice that I didn’t get to everything on my list. But that said—yes. Absolutely. The list helps.

I transfer things from my calendar onto that list, and since I limit myself to five tasks that means I can’t overload my day. I have to move those extra tasks to later. So that helps me to think through my list and to prioritize.

I also have a record of when I did things. I know I struck Task X off on July 23rd. DONE. Now I can move on, my bandwidth freed up, my soul feeling a little less crushed from the weight of all the To-Dos.

It works. It works for me, anyway. The combination of my calendar and this list is a good one. It helps me create more time while still getting everything done.

I’m continuing to experiment and to see if I can refine this, add some new things, take some things away. But I’m pretty happy with my results so far.

If you try this and like the process, be sure to let me know in the comments below!

Until then, good health and God bless.