Especially if we’ve established our trusted container—every time we have a moment to do something, we’ll turn to the list in our container, grab one of these things, and do it. Which is great. Socks? Ordered! Eggs? Boiled! You are crossing things off like a to-do list champ. Go you!
Except.
Except what about the big stuff? The massive and really, really important stuff? Things like:
Get promoted. Travel to Europe. Write novel. Have baby. Get physically stronger. Change the world.
When are we going to have time for those?
This is why we have to put the big stuff—yep, even the extremely big stuff—on our to-do lists as well.
Sometimes this means breaking things down into just their very first step, and putting that on the list:
Book meeting to talk with boss about what it would take to get promoted.
Spend 15 minutes researching cost of plane tickets to Paris.
Schedule dinner with spouse to start talking about whether we’re ready for parenthood.
But other times it means putting the whole giant goal on the list and having it recur. So every week you will work a bit on that novel, or on strength training, or on changing the world for the better.
Remember, our to-do lists are not the boss of us. We are the boss of them. We control what goes on them. We control how we spend our days, which means we control how we spend our lives.
And when we put the important stuff on the list, that stuff happens.
SMALL BITS OF TIME FREQUENTLY
“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”
—ANTHONY TROLLOPE
To really internalize the truth of Trollope’s sentiment, to truly grasp the awesome power of small bits of time repeated frequently, all that’s needed is a simple thought experiment:
To stand in for whatever the great big, daunting, seemingly impossibly large thing you personally might want to undertake is, let’s use this: learning to draw.
So, say you want to learn to draw. Right now, you don’t know how at all. The idea of starting, of tackling such a large project, when you are as busy as you are, seems daunting, right?
But imagine that, starting one year ago, you began setting your alarm fifteen minutes earlier on weekdays and using that time to draw. Fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, for a year. Even if we take out a couple of weeks for vacation, that’s still more than sixty hours of drawing practice you’d have already had by now. You would, without question, be better at drawing at the end of the year than you were at the beginning.
People have written whole novels this way. People have started companies. People have taught themselves languages. Rekindled romances. Learned to meditate. Read the entire Harry Potter series to their children.
If we kid ourselves that big things can only be done in big chunks of time, then we sell ourselves—and our lives—impossibly short. We don’t have big chunks of time, so we’re basically saying big things are impossible for us. We curtail the possibility of enrichment or ambition before we’ve even begun.
There is a better way. Just like you can nearly always fit one more book on a crowded bookshelf, you can find or make those small pockets of time in your day. Then commit them to your big idea. And watch the magic happen.
ALTERNATIVE WORK SCHEDULES
“People set their own time. Some work 8 to 4, some work 10 to 6, some work 9 to 5.”
—PATRICIA RESNICK
At the end of Patricia Resnick’s film 9 to 5, when the women take over the office, the first thing they do is institute flexible work schedules and job sharing (along with a wellness program, on-site day care, and, oh yeah, equal pay).
Forty years on, many offices are finally starting to get on board with the idea that having your butt in your chair during certain specific hours on certain specific days does not necessarily map onto optimum productivity.
There are numerous alternate schedules, but one particularly promising one is the “9/80 schedule”: an employee works 80 hours in 9 days rather than 10 and then takes the tenth day off. Those every-other Fridays off then become fertile ground for personal tasks, family time, creative side-hustles, or just chilling the heck out.
MENTAL WORK IN THE MORNING, PHYSICAL WORK IN THE AFTERNOON
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon.”
—WILLIAM BLAKE
The vast majority of folks—yes, even those of us who aren’t “morning people”—are better at using our brains in the first half of the day and our bodies in the second half. Of course, most have jobs where we must do one or the other nearly all the time. Nice as it would be to design houses in the morning, then go build them after lunch, few people get to work like that. But we can still apply this principle to good effect. For instance:
Do all your ambitious work in the a.m., and save busywork for the p.m.
If you have a desk job, schedule meetings for the afternoon (better yet, make them walking meetings)
If you have a physical job (plumber, yoga teacher), reserve an hour in the morning for your planning or paperwork
If you work on your feet (teaching, retail), don’t ask yourself to do brain work (lesson planning, shift scheduling) at the day’s end
DON’T WORK WHEN YOU’RE NOT WORKING
“If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”
—EVERYONE’S MOM, EVER
OK, so this one is controversial.
Many, many office workers—maybe even most—nowadays check work email from home at night, on the weekends, even first thing when they wake up in the morning.
That doesn’t make it a good idea.
It’s like your mom always said about peer pressure: Just because everyone else is doing something doesn’t make that the right thing to do.
And, yes, there can be tremendous pressure to comply with these norms, especially in certain industries.
And, hey, sure, maybe you’ve made the conscious decision to work your butt off around the clock for a couple of years to get where you want to be. Fine.
Just don’t let this be your default mode forever. Don’t let it be an unexamined normal behavior.
Because, if you let it, work email can be the biggest time vacuum cleaner you ever did see. It can suck up every spare moment you might possibly be devoting to anything else that matters in your life—and even some non-“spare” moments, like ones you could be spending with your family, for instance. It will distract you, make you more anxious and less present.
If you are working, then work. If you are not working, don’t work. There is no in-between land.
Of course, if you want or need to take on a second line of work—work writing that novel, work for a political candidate, work on a side-hustle for extra cash, volunteer work, house work, working out—by all means, go nuts. Evenings and weekends are the perfect chances to find those pockets of time to devote to such things.
But for the job that’s paying you a paycheck? Not so much. Think about it—is that paycheck really large enough to buy all your time? Nope, didn’t think so.
PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE
“Stop looking at the world through your cellphone screens. Have a real experience.”