To-Do Lists vs. Accomplishments Lists
Many professionals write up daily to-do lists. These lists ensure that their authors don’t forget tasks. They help a professional prioritize work or pick out an item that they can finish during an unexpected fifteen minute wait for someone who is late to a meeting. Crossing off tasks as they are completed is satisfying, and so serves as a gentle motivator.
To-do lists have many advocates. For them, if it’s not on their to-do list, it doesn’t happen. Lars, a client of mine, is one of these people. To-do lists have been a part of this routine for the better part of two decades and small, but recognized contributors to his successful career.
So, he was surprised this week, when I told him to take all of the business development tasks off his to-do list for a while. These were my reasons:
1> Lars had more client work to do than he ever had before. He was so overwhelmed that he wasn’t getting to any of his business development tasks, so having them on his to-do list wasn’t doing him any good, anyway.
2> The list of business development to-do’s kept getting longer, as he added new items, but never got around to completing and crossing off old ones. The longer the list got, the more discouraging was the outlook for ever getting through it. Its length had become demotivating as Lars began to doubt he could ever get past his client work to the growing list of BD tasks.
To replace the business-development to-do list, I recommended he create an accomplishments list. This starts as a sheet of paper with the word, Accomplishments, at the top and the date and nothing else. Lars is to add business development activities to the list as he completes them. He has agreed to add no fewer than one accomplishment each day. My guess is that he will add more, substantially more. That’s Lars.
A goal that seems utterly unachievable discourages rather than motivates. When circumstances make it impossible to achieve a goal that seemed reasonable when you set it, find a different way to look at the problem. Because of Lars’s heavy work load, it is reasonable to recognize each business development accomplishment that he fits in. Instead of being reminded repeatedly of all the things he feels he should be getting done, but isn’t, he will be reminded of what he has done. I am betting that this approach will boost his morale and so help him get more done.
I would especially welcome readers’ comments on to-do and accomplishments lists.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Ford, I’ve been using the “Getting Things Done” (by David Allen) system for a little while, and that system forces you to get comfortable with long to-do lists. Allen’s point is, if you don’t have it on a list, it will occupy a small part of your brain and contribute a small amount of stress. Have enough of these, and you obsess even more about what you’re not doing, or what you’re forgetting to do–that is my experience.
Allen also gets you to focus on the next item in a project, and not to worry so much about all the steps of a project, or how daunting a project is. The whole project may take five years, but the next step along the way may take five minutes.
Having every to-do on a list, regularly reviewed, allows you to decide to do it, give yourself permission to skip it, or delegate it. If Lars is overwhelmed by his list, it’s a signal he needs to delegate more, or find the low-value tasks on his list and simply cross ‘em off.
regards, John
August 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
John, thanks for your comment and for the reference to David Allen’s blook which sounds like a useful resource. I will lbuy a copy.
You are saying that what is not on the to-do list is out of mind and won’t get done, a position that all advocates of to-do lists would support–myself included.
Lars’s case was special. His firm has an extreme low-leverage model, makig delegation impossible–we explored this carefully. He stated explicitly that the growing list of business development to-dos was demotivating. He is extremely focused and hard-working, so in this case, I felt an accomplishments list would serve him better. Time will tell.
Your suggestions are a good reminder that a tool is only as effective as the skill with which we wield it. I will share them with Lars. There are some tricks we can all learn about using something as seemingly simple as the old-fashioned to do list. Ford
August 18th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hi Ford,
Like John, I use Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system - or a variation of it anyway.
Allen uses lists in multiple ways. Firstly to get things out of your head and onto paper - ensuring you don’t forget them - and as John says, reducing your stress somewhat.
But all the things your write down don’t necessarily go onto the same list. Allen uses context sensitive lists - lists of things you can do when you have 5 mins to use the phone, or things you can do while at home, or in the office or at your computer. In this way you don’t have to think about the items on your list and figure out whether they can be done - you just go to the relevant list and work through it.
He also advocates only putting the very next actions on your list - the things you can do straight away. Actions which have predecessor tasks or can’t be done yet go into project lists or a “someday/maybe” list. Those ones are reviewed weekly/monthly and transferred to the Next Action lists as needed. That way you don’t overwhelm your Next Action lists with stuff you can’t do yet. So to some degree this would help with Lars’ problem. Things he couldn’t do yet wouldn’t go on to his Next Action (To Do) list to hang around as a constant reminder of his failure to do them - they’d be noted down in project lists for later consideration so he didn’t forget them.
Ian
August 19th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Ian
You make a good case for graduate-level to-do listing. On reflection, I use a modified version of this myself. There is my regular list with two columns for the urgent and for the less so. Major projects, like writing a book, have their own lists, and items from those lists sometimes migrate to the regular list for more immediate attention.
That said and just to be contrary, let me take the other side for a bit. Something there is that does not love a list, especially a to-do list, which nags at us continually. When we respond to its prodding by whacking off a few items, it grows back longer and stronger like the weed it is. I am in total sympathy with Lars, who eventually found it demotivating. I recommned to all readers that if they find themselves listing such items as “kiss wife goodnight” it’s time to stop.
In contrast, an accomplishments list reminds you of what you have done without automatically contrasting it to the much longer list of things you haven’t. It becomes a challenge to see if you can make each day’s list longer than the last. Your can rate accomplishments by importance, providing a slightly more complicated but more robust way of measuring your successes. There is a lot to be said fot this.
Thanks for the comment.
Ford
August 23rd, 2008 at 2:48 am
I see a lot of merit in this approach. It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing everything that’s still to be done and focus on what’s not been accomplished and how far you are from your major goals. I see merit in taking time once a day to feel good about what’s been accomplished. Many times a set of activities are like drip irrigation, small accomplishments accumulates every day and over the course of a quarter or a year put you in a fundamentally different place.
If you can’t enjoy the journey and celebrate small victories along the way, why are you on it?
August 23rd, 2008 at 6:39 am
Sean:
Thanks for your comment. You have made the case for an accomplishments list better than I have. It’s reassuring to hear that there are others who see its value. In the end it is a personal choice of what works best for an individual, and we can all experiment. One does not rule out the other.
As an experiment I will try to run parrallel to-do and accomplishments lists for a month, the former for day-to-day to-dos and the latter for a longer term project and see what happens. Does anyone else want to try it?
Ford Harding
October 7th, 2008 at 11:57 am
[...] The best part of blogging is hearing from readers. Done right both the blogger and the reader benefit from this exchange. Recently, Glenn Andrew provided some interesting insights on elevator speeches that gave me some useful ideas. Ian Brodie taught me about more sophisticated applications of to-do lists than I had realized exist. I suspect others thought so as well. By posing more questions, I hope to generate more exchanges of this kind. What do you think of this idea? [...]