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When Eleanor was a little girl, maybe nine or ten years old, she needed new shoes. So she told her mother, and they agreed to go shoe shopping the following Saturday morning. But when Saturday rolled around, Eleanor’s mother got too busy and realized she wasn’t going to be able to fit in the shoe-shopping trip. So she told Eleanor they’d have to do it later.
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“When?” Eleanor asked.
“Sometime this weekend,” her mom responded.
“When this weekend?” Eleanor asked.
“Tomorrow,” her mom replied.
“When tomorrow?” Eleanor persisted.
“Two in the afternoon,” her mom answered.
Eleanor relaxed and smiled. “Sounds great! Thanks, Mom.”
And sure enough, at 2 PM the following day, Eleanor and her mom went to buy new shoes. Which, chances are, would not have happened had Eleanor not insisted on knowing exactly when they were going to go.
Eleanor has always been wise, and this is an early example. She intuitively knew what determines the difference between intending to do something and actually doing it. Eleanor understood the secret to getting stuff done.
She reminded me of this a few nights ago when she asked me how my day went and I responded that it went well but many things I’d hoped to do didn’t get done. She remarked that I felt that way every night. That I never got to the end of a day and felt like I’d accomplished everything I’d set out to. That, perhaps, what I hoped to get done in a day was unrealistic.
She’s right, of course. For many of us, our to-do list has become more of a guilt list. An inventory of everything we want to do, plan to do, think we should do, but never get to. More like an I’m-never-going-to-get-to-it list.
And the longer the list, the less likely we’ll get to it and the more stressed we’ll become.
We can find the solution to this nightmare in Eleanor’s childhood shoe-shopping trip. In the final question that satisfied her: “When tomorrow?”
It’s what I call the power of when and where.
In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam. One group was told simply to do it sometime in the next thirty days. The other group was asked to decide when and where in the next thirty days they were going to do it. Only 53 percent of the first group did the breast self-exam. But all of the women who said when and where they were going to do it—100 percent—completed the exam.
In another study, two groups of drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay. One group was tasked to write the essay sometime before 5 PM on a certain day. The other group also had to write the essay before 5 PM on a certain day but were asked to first decide when and where on that day they would do it. None of the first group wrote the essay. Not surprising. What is surprising is that 80 percent of those who said when and where they would write the essay completed it.
In other words, the problem with typical to-do lists is that we use them as our primary tool to guide our daily accomplishments. But it’s the wrong tool. A to-do list is useful as a collection tool. It’s there to help us make sure we know the pool of things that need to get done. It’s why categorizing the list into our areas of focus for the year is so important. Categorizing forces us to pay attention to what’s in the pool. It ensures that we’re focused on the right things—the ones that will move us forward in what we intend to accomplish for the year.
Our calendars, on the other hand, make the perfect tool to guide our daily accomplishments. Because our calendars are finite; there are only a certain number of hours in a day. As will become instantly clear the moment we try to cram an unrealistic number of things into limited spaces.
So, once you’ve got your categorized list of things to do, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by “the beginning of the day,” I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. That will make it most likely that you’ll accomplish what you need to and feel good at the end of the day.
Since your entire list will not fit on your calendar—and I can assure you that it won’t—you need to prioritize your list for that day. What is it that really needs to get done today? Which items have you been neglecting? Which categories have you been neglecting? Where can you slot those things into your schedule?
One more thing. As you schedule your priorities on your calendar for the day, make sure to leave some time, preferably in the afternoon, to respond to other people’s needs and the items in your Other 5% category. If you schedule it, you’ll be comfortable not doing it until the scheduled time. That leaves you free to focus on your priorities without worrying that you’re neglecting anything.
Following this process will invariably leave you with things still on your to-do list that you will not be able to accomplish during the day.
That’s a fantastic thing to know ahead of time. Because it would have happened anyway, but you would have ended up surprised, disappointed, and, most important, helpless. Because you were not exerting any real control over what got done and what got left behind.
Now, on the other hand, you can be strategic about what gets left behind. You can decide, in the morning or the night before, what’s really important to get done.
And, like Eleanor and her shoe-shopping trip, you can be relatively certain that if you decide when and where you’re going to do those things, you’ll actually, reliably and predictably, get them done.
If you really want to get something done, decide when and where you are going to do it.
