If you find it hard to prioritize your day, you’re not the only one. Many leaders I work with feel like their to-do lists run their lives. They bounce from task to task and react to whatever tugs at their attention. At the end of the day, they feel spent and wonder if it was all worth it. Productivity starts to diminish because they know they are doing a lot, but don’t know if they are doing the right things.
Many then start looking for answers. They look for strategies and try new apps, but the answer isn’t another app or system.
The answer is a subtle shift in how we think about our lists.
I was reminded of this recently when I heard Charles Duhigg, the bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, on the My First Million podcast. Duhigg is the author of three outstanding books: The Power of Habit, Supercommunicators, and Smarter Faster Better, and I was struck by a simple concept he shared that so many of us fail to implement.
Charles prioritizes his day the night before and limits his to-do list to one to three items.
This got me thinking that maybe we should all rename our to-do list to our today list, and be ruthlessly honest about how much we can actually accomplish. This simple change can make a big difference in how you prioritize your day.
How to prioritize your day
Charles keeps a memory list for everything he might want to do someday. This list is long and comprehensive, but it doesn’t need immediate action. Each night, when he sits down to prioritize his day, he looks over the memory list, picks the most important task for the next day, and writes it down. Sometimes he adds one or two more, but never more than three.
When I heard him explain this, my first thought was that I’d heard this advice before. But then I realized that Duhigg wasn’t talking about a system or a tactic.
He was describing the way he thinks, and that’s the point.
That’s what most people miss when they think about productivity. They think they need new tactics or strategies to stay productive. They look for strategy after strategy, hop from tool to tool, and implement tactic after tactic, but their productivity stays the same.
It stays the same because tactics will not work until your mindset does.
The real value behind what Duhigg shared with Sam Parr was the mindset behind it.
Three subtle shifts in mindset
- Shift from Cloudy to Committed – Most leaders see their to-do list as a record of what they hope to do. They assume that their day will be cloudy, so they make loose commitments. Duhigg sees his to-do list as a record of what he will do. He keeps a memory list for cloudy aspirations and ensures his daily list is for absolute commitments. Most people mix these up, or fail to make this distinction, which is why their lists keep growing and never get finished.
- Shift from Scattered to Focused – Duhigg decides where his attention will go before the day starts, not after his inbox and his calendar have already pulled at him. Most of us do the opposite. We let the day pull us in whatever direction is loudest, and we wonder at the end why we didn’t get to what actually mattered. Once you’ve decided in advance, it’s much harder for the day to drag you down.
- Shift from Timely to Time Bound – Timing is the third and quietest shift. Most of us try to figure out what actually deserves our focus while the day is already happening to us. Duhigg makes that decision the night before, when he’s calm, and nothing is tugging at his attention. By morning, he already knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t have to figure it out while he’s under pressure.
Shift from a to-do list to a today list:
If you want to get better at prioritizing your day, start tonight. Before the day ends, write down everything that’s on your mind in a memory list so you don’t have to keep thinking about it. Then ask yourself one simple question:
What is the most important thing I need to do tomorrow?
Write it down, and if needed, add one or two more. That’s your today list.
The next morning, don’t look at the memory list or open your email first. Start with the one to three things you committed to the night before, and do them. If everything else has to wait, it has to wait.
