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Smallest Todo List

·3 mins

Make it smaller than that.

No, even smaller.

It doesn’t matter what method you use, software or notebook, audio message or knot in your handkerchief. What’s important is the item itself.

For me it has to be small.

tiny.

As someone with a lifetime award for procrastination, if I feel resistance to doing a task I will do something else. Anything else.

One of the best ways to make a task palatable is to make it smaller.

  • Bake a tart that causes a food critic to have an emotional flashback to his grandmother’s cooking.

I’m not the kind of person that can do that

Let’s try making a delicious pear and almond tart

Like, in a patisserie? Are you crazy?

  • Poach peeled and cored pears in a flavoured syrup

If I get this wrong it’ll ruin the whole thing

  • Mix a velevety light frangipane

I don’t have a clue what I’m doing

  • Create a buttery shortcrust pastry

I’ve actually made pastry before but this is too much, there’s judgement in every task

If I’m scared of being judged I definitely don’t want to have it baked-in to the task itself.

Let’s make it a little easier on ourselves.

Tasks that are binary, are much less scary. They are either done or not done.

You don’t have to wait and see whether or not Gordon is going to scream at you.

  • Put all of the ingredients for pastry on the kitchen counter.

That’s not so bad, I can’t really get that wrong

  • Weigh 2 cups of flour into a mixing bowl.

It says cups! I don’t have a measuring cup. I’m failing again

Even though it seems trivial we’re still having an emotional response to this task.

Deep breath. Break it down.

  • Google a conversion from cups to grams.

  • Convert to the measurement we need.

  • Weigh the flour into a mixing bowl.

Create a task that doesn’t have some subjective requirement in it.

What’s the intimidating part? Why am I putting this off?

An example:

When writing breadcrumbs I added an item

  • save a copy of an image and link to the creator’s site in the caption.

A small, simple task. At the end of the day I didn’t get it done so I moved it to the next day’s list. And then I didn’t do it.

again.

Moving it to the top of the next day’s list I thought - I’ve completed other tasks and even added new ones. why is this task difficult?

In my head, linking to someone else’s site made me compare my work to theirs. ( and I really like their work ) A tiny task was making me feel inexperienced and inadequate. It feels silly to even admit to this but that was why I hadn’t done it.

So, smaller.

I wrote out separate tasks for saving the file, renaming the file, adding the file to the article and finally adding the caption to the article. And these tasks? none of them were big or intimidating enough to make me skip them.

I had taken

There are people with much better websites than mine

and turned it into easy steps that were easy to accomplish.

Small steps and even smaller todo lists.