Set aside your to-do list for a minute
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals
It’s a holiday week in the United States (American Thanksgiving), so for those of you celebrating, your to-do lists probably look a bit different this week: more potatoes, less Excel?
I have another idea for all of you, wherever you live: set aside ten minutes this week to replace your to-do list with a Done list.
Instead of writing down everything you have to do, list all the things you’ve done.
Pick a timeframe for your Done items: it can be the last 24 hours, the past 3 months, or all of 2021 so far.
Direct your attention at all you’ve done — and only that. This is the shift I’m proposing: move from blank to filling up, from lack to having … done these things. A list of what you’ve been able to do.
For this moment of Done listing, don’t linger on aspects of your projects you haven’t gotten to yet. Those are exciting and energizing (or daunting), but they’re not for this exercise. Like meditation, draw your mind back to the purpose of this Done list: to gather up all you’ve done.
In my mind, this list is an act of appreciation — a “thank you” note to that day or those days we were able to do.
Inspiration for making a Done list:
Author Oliver Burkeman says that too frequently, we wake up feeling like we’re in a “productivity debt.” Making a Done list is “a way of keeping some of the focus on the fact that you are accomplishing a whole bunch of things,” he says in this Life Kit interview.
No more than a dozen items. Blend your creation of a Done list with Ira Progroff’s idea of creating a list of the main events of your life, but limiting yourself to no more than a dozen steps. “By chronicling your life this way, you will be able to identify connections and correlations between events which had previously seemed disparate and unrelated (say, between your professional life and personal life,” writes Dominique Loreau who describes this type of list in more detail in L’art de la Liste (if you, like me, love lists in their less practical and more wild incarnations, this book is wonderful)
* I wonder: what would a “dozen events” Done list look like for your project? Especially if you make a point to include events from both your personal and professional lives that were occurring in tandem with the project’s evolution so far, from inception to this moment?