How To Trick Your Brain Into Actually Wanting To Do Your Tasks
Photo by MART PRODUCTION; Modified by Alexis Haselberger
Sometimes your to-do list is just too oppressive.
It’s so long.
You stare at it in analysis paralysis.
You don’t want to do any of it.
As I often tell my clients, lots of us are great at MAKING a list, and not that great at doing the things we put on the list.
(Sorta like that classic Seinfeld joke about restaurants that take reservations, but can’t keep reservations. But I digress.)
Sometimes, you’ve conflated your “someday/maybe” list with your real “to-do list” and that’s making things messy and way more overwhelming than necessary.
But I happened upon a strategy recently that was weirdly effective and so I want to share it with you.
Over my kids’ winter break from school, I took a few weeks off. And usually, when I’m on vacation, or taking time off, I like to limit my personal to-do list to the things that actually MUST be done (like paying bills) because there’s nothing worse than coming back from vacation and having felt like you need a vacation from the vacation because you spent it doing a bunch of tasks instead of enjoying yourself.
But also, there were several areas of my house that needed a good decluttering.
The stuff had been piling up in a major way for too long.
But I didn’t want to put decluttering on my to-do list, because I didn’t want to feel like I had to do this stuff.
I didn’t want to feel like I should be decluttering when what I wanted to do was watch “The Great British Bake-Off” while crocheting, or spending a leisurely afternoon at the pottery studio.
And so instead, I created a “could do” list, and on that “could do” list, I put all the decluttering tasks that I could do, if I wanted to, so I didn’t have to use my memory for them.
And that language of “could do” meant that I didn’t have to, there was no implied obligation.
If I got to it, great.
If not, well no harm done.
And do you know what I found?
By simply changing the language from “to do” to “could do”, I actually ended up getting quite a lot of it done.
Not because I had to, but because there were some days where I wanted to.
And if I hadn’t wanted to, then I wouldn’t have felt bad about it.
