Turn Your To-Do List Upside Down

Turn your to-do list upside down.

Unschedulers don’t have a list of tasks. Rather, they add a task to their schedule only after they’ve actually been doing it for at least 30 minutes. Perhaps you can already see the built-in psychological challenge and motivation in doing it this way around. With a timebox, you could realistically spend 30 minutes dithering and working inefficiently because unconsciously you’re waiting for the clock to run out. But this way around, you may find yourself more motivated—and ultimately putting in more time when you do sit down to work.

Better yet, a record of achievements you’ve already “banked” feels so much better emotionally than a list of all the things you should do. You get a tangible feeling of having achieved something. You watch the time available on your schedule filling up with good stuff and feel inspired to do even more. A far cry from procrastination! So block in the time you log after 30 minutes and really stop to appreciate the work you’ve done. Be proud and internalize those good feelings by writing them down or sharing your results with trusted others. That guilt you feel at the end of the day for doing “nothing”? Well, now you have hard evidence otherwise. Create a positive feedback loop by only focusing on what you have done, not on what you haven’t.

Importantly, you’re going to need to watch for distractions. You want at least 30 minutes, but 30 undisrupted minutes. You might notice that so-called “deep work” takes less overall time but is far richer and of better quality. With time, you may see that you’d rather do 30 minutes of good, solid work and then an hour of play or rest or anything else instead of 1.5 hours forcing yourself through a task you don’t want to do and being distracted every five minutes anyway. Try to work for longer patches of time, fully engaged, with zero distractions, pushing the limits of your cognitive capacity (remember flow?). You’ll extract more productivity and satisfaction from less time, leaving you with more of your life to enjoy as you like, guilt-free.

Avoid mentally and emotionally draining “shallow work” where you keep busy, watch the clock, flit from one distraction to the next, and then feel bad when you stop, unable to rest because you know that your break time is disappearing with every second and you have to return to work again. It’s what makes you feel like you’ve been “busy” all day with nothing to show for it. It leaves you feeling emotionally tired but not really mentally stimulated and with a heap of negative feelings toward your work. Is it any wonder we procrastinate?

As you can see, the unschedule approach is more about tackling the emotional aspects of work and why we avoid it. It’s more about the why of procrastination than the how—if you’re someone who has identified primarily psychological or emotional reasons for your procrastination habit, this approach may work where plenty of other more practically oriented techniques fail. On the other hand, this approach may not work as well if your issue is more that you’re cognitively overwhelmed, confused, or simply don’t know how to start or organize yourself.

If you find unscheduling works for you though, stick with it. It’s all about creating those positive associations with work and building up an unconscious desire to optimize, to really create value. This will loosen the grip of any bad procrastination habits as well as enriching the work you do. Take the time to reward yourself if you succeed in sitting down at a task for more than 30 minutes. Tell your brain to focus on this feeling of satisfaction and pleasure by recording your achievement or rewarding yourself with some play or rest or a more enjoyable task.

Overcoming inertia takes effort. Paying focused attention takes effort. Remember that “behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated” and “what gets measured gets improved.” Rather than associating your work with dread and guilt and obligation, you begin to associate it with some pretty powerful feelings of confidence and achievement. Your schedule stops being a slave driver and becomes a record of your achievements and progress, so it’s important to log what you’ve done. Look back on this log at the end of every week or month.

Rest and relaxation are important.

Let’s turn to the “day off” principle. Using Fiore’s guidelines, take one full day off every week, at least, to tackle little errands, relax, or simply enjoy yourself. If you feel guilty doing so, look at the reason why. Are you still laboring under the belief that you’re not allowed to enjoy life until your work—which is never realistically finished—is finished? When you relax, remind yourself that you are lowering your chances of procrastination, resentment, and burnout later down the line.

And really, relaxation time has so many more benefits than merely recharging your batteries so you can go out to work and drain them again. Time spent enjoyably adds dimension, meaning, and color to your life. It is your life. Think of it this way: an overachiever, workaholic, and perfectionist is just as bad as an underachiever and procrastinator. They both mismanage their time, energy, and emotional health.

Instead, keep balanced. Protect your vacation time like it’s as vital and nonnegotiable as your yearly dental check-up—because it is. It’s the old quality versus quantity argument. Wouldn’t you rather take appropriate time off and allow yourself to build up a store of fresh energy and enthusiasm for work than continually drain an already empty tank and force what little you can from yourself, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually?

Take at least a day off per week and at least an hour a day for simple relaxation. Start to reframe this as your responsibility. It is not morally wrong to stop working or to “do nothing.” Be careful, also, that you’re not approaching your downtime with the same attitude you bring to work. Pushing yourself through leisure activities just because you believe you should is counterproductive. In fact, stop thinking of it as “downtime” at all—it’s not time defined as the absence of work, but the presence of other wonderful things you care about and that are good for you.

Are you worried you’ll end up being a lazy good-for-nothing who never gets the job done? Another rule for managing your time and energy is to commit to 30 minutes of work before doing a social engagement or activity. Yes, it is somewhat the “work before play” mindset, but you’re in charge. Here, you focus on the reward, on deep work, and ensuring you enjoy your leisure time without guilt. It’s a way to spread a little of your enthusiasm for one activity onto another.

Just start, keep starting, and never end “down.”

Don’t worry about finishing. Forget the goal for a second. Just start. Then keep just starting, over and over. Keep your eye on the small tasks only—think process, not outcome. Finally, stop a task on a good note. End when you’re ahead, in other words, and don’t stop in the middle of a challenge, otherwise you give yourself something unpleasant to pick up when next you start. If you can, leave yourself a nice little nugget of fairly pleasant work to wait for you at your next work session—this makes it easier to start again.