#122: Write it down, make it happen
Do you get up every day and tear around trying to get stuff done, and yet still end up feeling overwhelmed and frustrated at your lack of progress? There's something very simple - so simple, in fact, that you're going to feel cheated and frankly furious as soon as I tell you what it is - that you can do to get more done and feel less frantic. Now, I know you don't have time to listen to this episode because YOU SHOULD BE WRITING, but trust me on this one. Get the kettle on, take a break, and have a listen. You'll be glad you did.
Episode transcript:
Don’t know where to start? I’ve got a plan.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, everyone, from the tail end of the worst cold/flu/maybe even covid that I’ve had in a while. I’m actually really hoping I’ve actually had more than one illness back to back, because otherwise I am apparently less capable of bouncing back from illness than I used to be, and I’m now on an inexorable decline to the grave. But you haven’t come here to listen to my existential angst, have you? So, chin up and all that, and on with the uplifting, sunny content. I mean, I’ll do my best, anyway. If you’re a super attentive listener to this podcast, you’ll recall that I promised you an interview episode this time, and yet here I am, on my tod, no guest in sight. That episode is on its way. It just needs a bit longer in the oven, what with one thing and another - including me falling a bit behind - and I’m going to bringing it to you in the new year. Though, actually, I’m not quite as behind as I might have expected - and that’s what I want to talk to you about in this episode. I have one weird productivity trick to share with you. Heads of department and PhD supervisors hate it when academics do this one thing, but they can’t stop you. Do this one thing every morning and watch the money roll in, the weight fall off, the wrinkles melt away, your crappy jokes become a million times funnier, and your teenage kids - if you have them - suddenly decide that you are slightly less embarrassing than you were before. Ok, I’ll stop now. I’m doing a sort of nervous chatter thing, because while I do have a surprisingly powerful productivity strategy that I want to share with you, it’s so incredibly pedestrian that I’m worried that you might end up feeling short-changed and perhaps even enraged. If I was a different sort of podcast blatherer I’d dress it up as much as is humanly possible and perhaps call it a ‘theory’ and even do a book about it, but then I wouldn’t be able to meet my own eye when I look in the mirror. So, what I’m going to do instead is tell you what it is, and then I want to share with you my reflections - which have been going on for some time now, as I’ve watched my own progress and heard other people talk about theirs - about why it works, because I’m not doing magic here. Ok, in my effort to manage your expectations and kind of apologise in advance for this episode, I’ve accidentally done a horrible clickbaity build-up like the infuriating preamble before an online recipe, so let me get on with it. I’m just going to say it. It’s this: make a list, every single morning, of what you need to do that day. Stay with me here, my friend. It gets better. Let me tell you a bit about my relationship with daily task lists. For years, I’ve gone through occasional phases of sitting down first thing in the morning and writing a list of the things I need to get done that day. I’ve noticed that, when I do that, I tend - not always, but often - to do all the things on the list. And when I don’t do all the things on the list, I tend to do most of them, and end up with insights about why I didn’t get the other things done. Writing down what needs to happen somehow makes it way more likely to happen. So, I think to myself, ‘Huh, that’s interesting’, but then at some point I just fall out of the habit of making the daily list, until a few months pass and I start doing it again. It’s a cycle, in other words, and until fairly recently I hadn’t given much thought to why it happens - what leads me to start doing it, what leads me to stop doing it, and why it’s effective at helping me get things done. This most recent spell of list-making - which, actually, has been going on for quite a longish time now - I’ve started to pay attention to what might be going on. I’ve got you to thank for that, as it happens. Because, I thought to myself: this is really weirdly effective, I should talk about it on the podcast. Then I thought: but I can’t just go, ‘hey, make a list, it helps you get things done, here’s a link to my book called “the magic list theory”’. I need to have something sensible to say about why it works. Now, I’ve already talked before about making lists - back episode #21: Let's talk about lists, plans, and goals. I’m going to take care in this episode not to repeat what I’ve said before - that’s increasingly a hazard as the back catalogue of episodes expands - but if, like plenty of my coaching clients, you have an aversion to writing down what you need to get done, what you care about, and planning stuff out, you might find that episode useful. It’s a more general one than this episode is going to be. So, why does starting the day by writing a task list help with getting things done? I think that an important factor here is that, if you’re reluctantly contemplating writing a task list, you’re probably struggling to manage all your various commitments, and perhaps also feeling increasingly overwhelmed. The word ‘reluctantly’ is important here. Some people just like doing lists. It’s the way they work. Sometimes their lists look really nice - they use nice pens and pretty notebooks, and do their best handwriting. For those people, deciding to make a list is not a desperate move, something that only happens when they find themselves snarled up in a tangle of deadlines, obligations, and stuff they really ought to have said ‘no’ to months ago, so they decide they need to write it all down in the hope of belatedly getting on top of it all, getting out the way, starting over. People like this do not tend to make attractive lists, although sometimes they do, because spending time on prettifying their list is a form of procrastination and perhaps also something that makes them feel that at least something they’re creating is high quality. More often, though, people like this make lists that are stained with tears and written on scraps of paper because they don’t feel that their car crash of a life is worthy of that nice Leuchtturm notebook that a thoughtful relative gifted them on their last birthday, believing that this is the sort of object that a successful professional would find useful, but which instead has sat attractively unused and reproachful on a shelf while they wait for the day that their life is sufficiently together to be able to use it. Go-to places for me to write my own lists in the past have included the back of stuff I’ve printed out by accident, the unused pages of my children’s exercise books, and the paper wrapping from toilet rolls. Honestly, in the days before I started doing this podcast, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to question the places where I was writing my lists, but I did find myself wondering about it - specifically, wondering what my therapist might say about it - especially when I started using the toilet roll wrappings (which, in my defence, are handily A4 size (more or less) and sort of pretty), and especially given the fact that I am not short of nicer places to make lists. I have shelves that are creaking under the weight of nice notebooks with absolutely nothing written in them, because I was convinced that thus far in my life I had not had a thought worthy of inscribing in such a nice place. So, what does all this say about me, and my attitude to the things I’ve been trying to accomplish? And what does it say about you - because the only reason I’m sharing any of this is that I’ve seen all of this weird, angsty, unhealthy stuff reflected in people I’ve coached, many times over? What it says, I think, is that I thought of the things I was planning to write down - which was a list of my daily tasks, just to remind you in case I’ve distracted you with all that talk of toilet rolls and angst - as so unimportant or unworthy or wrong that it would somehow be destructive or wasteful to write it on anything except paper that was about to be binned anyway. I was viewing what I planned to write as - well, vandalism. Writing it in a nice notebook would be the equivalent of spoiling the notebook by scribbling in it. Which is weird, right? Because I also thought that the things I wanted to write down were important things. That’s why I was going to write them down. They were largely things I needed to do to further the projects I cared most about. They weren’t just things related to my professional life - they also included stuff like making medical appointments for my children. Not even my inner critic, on her worst days, thinks that’s unimportant. So, why was I approaching my list-making in such a rubbishy way? I’ve come to realise that, while I definitely didn’t think of the goals I was trying to achieve - goals I’d make progress towards by doing the things on the list - were unimportant, I was very pessimistic, and perhaps even contemptuous, of my own efforts to achieve them. Writing a task list was just my latest desperate attempt to get on top of things. I probably wouldn’t do the things, so what was the point of writing them down? I’d probably forget that I’d even made the list, so why was I wasting my time writing it? And even if I did end up doing all the things on this list, even if the whole thing turned out to be a giant success and I ended the day thrilled and flabbergasted by my incredible productivity, it probably wouldn’t be long before I was back to my old habits. This would probably end up being the latest productivity strategy I’d get my hopes up about before it all petered out and I had nothing to show for it except a ruined fancy notebook. My reluctance to make lists - at least, my reluctance to make them on anything other than waste paper - reflected my lack of faith in myself. Jump forward a bit, and I have a beautiful Leuchtturm notebook with a bright yellow cover that I use solely for the purpose of making my daily task lists, and these days I do have faith in my ability to do the things on the list. Of course, I’m not aiming for perfection: I complete everything on my daily task lists about half the time, I’ve occasionally used the notebook to write down things other than tasks, and I make no attempt to use my best handwriting - in fact, at this stage in my life, I don’t think I even have a best handwriting. At this point, writing a daily task list is a very different sort of activity compared to what it used to look like in the past. To reach this stage, and to turn it into a sustained, measured, proactive strategy for getting things done whereas before it was more like the panicked gasps of someone drowning in a rising tide of obligations, a few things had to change, and I think understanding what those were helps shed light on why it’s a useful thing to do. The first thing is that it’s no longer a desperate, panicked act. As I mentioned, sitting down and writing down the things I needed to do that day was, in the past, a last-resort sort of thing for me. There would be more and more stuff to get done, and as the days and weeks passed I’d feel increasingly anxious about it, and I was constantly afraid that I was forgetting something important, and occasionally I would think to myself ‘Hmm, maybe I ought to write down all the stuff I need to do’, but the idea of doing that was unappealing for the reasons I talked about back in episode #21 - I felt like there was so much to do that I just didn’t have time to sit down and make a list, and even if I did, writing down the things I was supposed to be doing opened up the possibility of missing something important off the list and … although I could have added any missing items to the list when I remembered them, and although an incomplete list was arguably better than no list at all, these very sensible thoughts simply don’t arise for someone who feels so overwhelmed by everything that they’re scared to think through all the things they’re meant to be doing in the first place. Yes. Let’s start with that ‘I don’t have time to make a list!’ worry, shall we? Because there was a certain logic to what I - and other task-list-avoiders - was trying to do here. There’s stuff to do, so get out of bed and do it, grab the day by the throat, don’t sit there faffing over a list, because that’s not grabbing the day by the throat, that’s more like timidly standing aside and letting the day charge all over the place. And if you’re thinking to yourself, ‘hey, grabbing the day by the throat is a really horrible violent metaphor’, I completely agree - but then, the entire process felt like going into battle. It felt like a zombie showdown. Kill or be killed. My morning alarm clock may as well have been an emergency alarm. The day started off with a red alert. Now, if you really are going into battle, or if you have an exciting, adrenaline-fueled job like a firefighter or an on-call doctor, then that red-alert wake-up might actually be beneficial. Wake up to an emergency, tear around sorting it out, then - hopefully - relax. But that’s not the sort of work I was doing, and it’s probably not the sort of work that you’re doing, either. If you’re doing something like writing, then there’s at least two very good reasons that that sort of panic-driven approach to getting things done is a terrible idea. One is that it’s just not suited to the sort of work you’re doing. If you’re trying to write something, or doing something else that involves deep thought, you need to proceed a bit more slowly and quietly to get the ideas and the creativity flowing. Another reason is that, with something like writing, there just isn’t an end in sight the way there is with a fire or a medical emergency. If you’re a firefighter on their way to tackle a house fire, it’s all go go go until the fire’s out, and then you can slow down. If you’re writing - I mean, unless there’s a deadline that’s crept up on you - there’s no equivalent of putting out the fire, or if there is (like a publication or a conference presentation), it’s something that happens over a much longer period of time - certainly not the sort of time period during which you can sustain a frenzied, adrenaline-charged effort without completely depleting yourself. Most of the time, for people like you, it’s best to avoid having to work in a state of panic. However - and this bit’s important - if you start the day, as I used to, telling yourself that you can’t possibly take five minutes to write down what you want to get done that day because the clock is ticking and there’s not a moment to lose, you’re inadvertently putting yourself into emergency mode. You’re acting like there’s an emergency, even if you don’t actually, seriously think there is. Bad for your concentration and your creativity, exhausting, and it also comes with the unpleasant effect of making you feel that every moment you spend doing something that’s not driving your productivity forward is a hideous waste of time. So, you go downstairs and switch on the kettle to make a cup of coffee, and it’s hard to avoid viewing yourself as reproachfully as a team of firefighters would view a colleague who stops to make a cuppa when the emergency alarm goes off. All of which is to say: telling yourself that you don’t have time to make a task list is a bad idea, not only for your productivity but also for your emotional wellbeing. Stop to make the list. Set the scene for calm, spacious work. Now, I mentioned already that in the past my morning task-list-writing came in cycles. I’d do it for a few days, and then after a while I’d stop doing it, and the reason I’d stop - as far as I could tell - is that I’d get to a point where I’d have a pretty good idea what I ought to be doing that day, so making the list felt like a waste of time. I’d just get on with whatever it was I needed to do. Until a few weeks or months later, when I again felt like there was a murky cloud of obligations hovering over me, just out of sight. What it took me a long time to realise, though, was that by doing this - by stopping the daily task list habit when I felt like I knew what I was meant to be doing - I was quitting just as things were getting good! It’s really quite revealing, in an unsettling way. Implicitly, I apparently believed that organisation and reflection are things you do when you’re in a panic, and that if you’re not in a panic, then you don’t need to do them. So I’d stop, because apparently I was fine with the idea - or maybe just accepting of it or resigned to it - that I’d end up in a panic again sooner or later. The panic, though - the amorphous, non-specific dread - is the horrible part. Even worse than the missed deadlines and unfulfilled obligations .That horrible sense that there are things that you’re meant to be doing and that you’re so disorganised that you might have forgotten about some of the things you’re meant to be doing, so the things you are actually worried about are just the tip of the iceberg, and you end up thinking to yourself, ‘I know things are out of control, but they’re probably even worse than I think’. There are unknown unknowns, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld. Writing a daily task-list even on those mornings when you don’t see any point because you already know what you’re meant to be doing is really helpful here. Think of it as productivity and emotional housekeeping. You’re keeping the unknown unknowns at bay. Let’s dig a bit further into this. Not knowing exactly what it is that’s causing you distress makes things worse than they need to be. This is what led the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel to come up with the expression ‘name it to tame it’ to describe the effectiveness that noticing and naming strong negative emotions has on making them less intense. If you’ve ever talked through your fears or anxieties, or journalled about them, and ended the process feeling a little more positive, then you’ve experienced this effect. Writing a task list does this. You might think of a task list as a purely dispassionate, practical tool to catalogue the things you need to do, but it has an emotional effect too, especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed. You’re overwhelmed by how much there is to do, you write it down, and suddenly it feels a bit more manageable. The reason for that is not necessarily that you simply overestimated how much there was to do before you wrote it down - although you may well have been doing this. But it might also be that you’re benefiting emotionally from naming the obligations you feel overwhelmed by. There’s more to the benefit of naming your obligations. I mentioned before that the business of writing - unlike the business of putting out a house fire - is an activity without an end in sight. We say to ourselves things like, ‘I’m not writing enough’ and ‘I ought to be writing more or faster or better’, which are unhelpfully nonspecific. What are the success conditions here? How do you know when you’ve accomplished goals like those? There aren’t any, and you don’t, respectively. These are not SMART goals. But the act of making a daily task list forces you to be specific. You’re planning to be able to tick things off the list by the end of the day - at least, I hope that’s what you’re planning because that’s the fun part. So, ‘Write more’ isn’t going to cut it as an item on the list, because it’s impossible to tell when you’re allowed to tick it off. So, you need to be more specific - to write something like ‘Write for an hour’ or ‘Write 500 words’. That way, you know when you’re done. And, of course, there are other things on the list too, and those are going to influence your writing ambitions. On some days, if there’s other stuff to do, maybe you don’t add any writing goal to the list at all. Then you get to skip the writing with a clear conscience. Or perhaps you revise it to ‘Write 300 words’ or ‘write 100 words’, and then you’re done sooner, and again, you can tick it off the list with a clear conscience, and get on with the other things on the list. What this shows is not only that being specific is helpful - it also shows that doing a task list helps encourage you to think carefully and constructively about how to manage your time and how to set expectations for the day. It doesn’t take that long for you to tune in to a sense of what a realistic daily task list looks like, and to think about the day ahead as a finite amount of time - which might sound obvious, but it’s an idea that a lot of us struggle with anyway. If you start the day with a vague sense of ‘must do more’, it’s easy to end the day feeling bad about all the things you didn’t make progress with, regardless of what you accomplished. But if you start out with a realistic list of specific things to get done, and if you do them, you might occasionally find yourself having the bizarre and alien experience of ending the day feeling that you’ve done what you could, and that you don’t need to feel bad about the things that didn’t get done. You can add the things you didn’t get done to the list for another day. Fewer unknown unknowns for you. Less overwhelm. Now, if you’re not overwhelmed, then you don’t need the emotional soothing that a morning task list exercise can provide. What then? You do the task list anyway, dummy - that way maybe you can avoid feeling overwhelmed a few weeks down the line. I hope it’s obvious that I’m not claiming here that beating overwhelm is as simple as writing a task list every day. Sometimes we’re overwhelmed because we’re overburdened - because our employer is too demanding, our (or someone else’s) expectations are too high, we have poor boundaries, and various other things. It’s very common, in these circumstances, for people to blame themselves. That vague sense of ‘should be doing more’ can be incredibly effective at glossing over the cold, hard fact that actually doing all the things you think you should be doing would require more hours in the day, more days in the week, less sleep, being in more than one place at once, and so on. We both know how easy you find it to blame yourself when things fall by the wayside. And, while writing a daily task list can’t magically add extra hours or energy to what’s already available, it can make the inappropriate self-blame more difficult, and it can make it easier to identify where something has to give. If you’re in the habit of writing a task list every morning, one that’s adjusted to your sense of how much it’s realistic to expect of yourself over the course of the day, and if there are important things you’re not getting done, then it’s hard to ignore when realistically, something has to change. Commitments need to be backed out of. Projects need to be cancelled or postponed. Obligations need to be delegated. I’m not suggesting that any of those changes are easy or fun - but if you want to work and live in a sustainable way, they’re sometimes necessary. In any case, feeling overwhelmed and out of control isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either. I mentioned already that ticking things off the list is the fun part. It really is! So satisfying. On the days when I tick off all the items on my list, I draw a smiley face on it too. Go ahead and laugh at me, your mockery simply cannot penetrate the forcefield of smugness that my smiley-faced task list has built around me like a Pokemon protect shield. And because it’s so satisfying to tick things off the list, and because the things on the list are very specific goals, having the list often helps me painlessly squeeze a bit more out of myself when I’m spent for the day. On those days when I know I’m not going to complete all the items on the list, I’ll sometimes take a look at it before I finish and think to myself something like, ‘I’ll just do this one thing, it will only take a few minutes and then I’ll be able to cross it off the list’. Or I might think of a small task that wasn’t on the list and add it, just for the pleasure of ticking it off. It’s hard to overlook items on the list when doing them is an easy win, even when it’s the end of the day and I’m tired. And, as I say, there’s no need to be perfectionistic here. Sometimes you don’t get everything done, and that’s fine - you’re not here for perfection. There’s invariably something to learn when that happens, whether it’s the realisation that you were a bit overambitious in what you thought you’d be able to do over the course of a day, or that a certain task on the list was more time- or energy-consuming than you expected. Have I inspired you to make a list of the things you’re aiming to accomplish today? Might I even have led you to think that maybe it would be acceptable for you to write in that lovely notebook you’ve been saving? If I have, then I’m delighted. You can start tomorrow morning - or, if you don’t want to wait, do it now. Because that can be really helpful too, for some people - making the list the night before, so that you can go to bed with a clear idea of what you’ll be doing tomorrow. If it helps you get things done, I’m glad. But if it helps you feel a bit happier and less fraught, I’m delighted. Tan y tro nesaf.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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