Summary

“I can’t use to-do lists, because when I write things down, I see how much there is to do, then I shut down and go back to bed. It feels awful! I hate it.” The struggle is real, but I propose a way out: a way to have the benefits of the to-do list without the crushing anxiety and constant reminders that you’re disappointing everyone, especially yourself.

I’ve heard this many times over the years:

… getting everything out of your head into a million projects and tasks feels like you are asked to do a little of everything.

https://bsky.app/profile/deejaygraham.bsky.social/post/3mfu3lh7oe22n

This leads to conclusions that I don’t share, such as “Getting Things Done pushes people towards multitasking [and I agree that multitasking is generally a mistake]”. I understand how reaching this conclusion can sour a person on Getting Things Done, but I see that conclusion as both a pity and avoidable.

The Apparent Moral Goodness of Never Saying “No”

You might have been conditioned to do (maybe literally) whatever people ask you to do. Some well-meaning adults might have taught you to do this when you were too young to question it. They taught you the virtues of helping, of being of service, of doing for others what you hope they would do for you when you needed it. Entire populations are taught the undeniable moral goodness of behaving this way. Religion aside, all this generally guides young people to become helpful, reliable members of society.

Sadly, it also risks teaching young people that they can’t say “No”. They grow up with a vague, unexplained, visceral, undeniable aversion to rejecting people’s requests to do things for them. They feel over-responsible for disappointing people, so they keep committing to more and more and more. And this becomes why they need a system such as Getting Things Done in the first place!

Folks struggling with Too Much To Do and Constantly Disappointing Everyone (Especially Themselves!) have a big, messy Inbox in their head: a master list of things they need to figure out when they’re going to do. Some of them also have some structure in their mind resembling Projects and Next Actions. Mostly, however, they have a jumble of too many tasks that they are constantly expediting and constantly forgetting and rediscovering. It feels really painful. It saps their energy. It sends them back to bed. Or worse.

Along comes Getting Things Done, which encourages them to start by bringing order to the chaos: write everything down and put it in The Inbox. Gather everything into The Inbox. Once you’ve got things safely in The Inbox, you can begin to figure out what you’ll do when, in what order: how you’ll manage to follow through on your commitments. It claims that this is a path to no longer having deadlines sneak up on them. It helps them stop letting important tasks fall through the cracks until they become urgent (and expensive!). It allows them to forget safely, so that they can focus on one thing at a time until, almost like magic, things are routinely getting done.

Sadly, it also risks freaking them out when they realize just how much they’ve committed to doing. And since The Universe keeps asking them to do things, they see The Inbox growing and growing and growing. The more they work The System, the farther behind they fall! They conclude that Getting Things Done hasn’t worked.

If you’re in this situation, or worried about this becoming your future, I have a proposal for you!

Options, Not Obligations

When you look at The Inbox and your Projects and Next Actions, what do you see? I suspect you see long lists of commitments, stretching as far as the eye can see. Commitments. Future Broken Promises. Obligations.

Guess what? You can choose.

It probably doesn’t feel like it, but you can choose. Over time, you can learn to see what’s in your Trusted System as options, not obligations. I suggest you start with The Inbox.

Detour: Software Development and Backlogs

In the world of software development, they talk often about Backlogs as a fundamental tool of planning. They have Product Backlogs (what we have to do in order to ship the product) and Iteration Backlogs (what we have to do in order to declare victory over the next 2 weeks or month). They probably have other kinds of Backlogs that they didn’t even read about in a book. These Backlogs are glorified, vaunted, revered, and feared shared “to do” lists. The details don’t matter much for this discussion, it might shock you to learn that these Backlogs are a source of significant confusion, debate, and dysfunction in the world of professional software development. I help clients with these problems. Many of those problems are problems of their own creation. (No shade; just facts. The struggle is real.)

Just like you and seeing The Inbox as frightening, painful obligations.

One big problem for software development professionals is that they see the Backlog as an immutable list of commitments. Once they put items in their various Backlogs, negotiation stops. They don’t adjust the plan to match emerging reality, such as workers quitting, getting sick, or going on vacation. Or learning that this key feature that we bet on is not going to sell. Or learning that that key feature is going to take 4 times as long to build as everyone thought, because technology. In professional software development, they cling to the misguided notion that they first plan, then they execute the plan, then they profit. In this environment, they turn Backlogs into immutable plans. Backlogs become constant reminders that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. They feel like prisons.

Software development professionals use some of the tools of planning, but they forget to plan: to adjust their expectations as they encounter unpleasant surprises, to change their minds as they find out that their plan isn’t going to work, to react to the changing personnel and cash flows and market pressures.

This Is Not About Software Development

Maybe you do this, too. You intend to volunteer at your child’s school, but then you find out that it takes 3 times as much time and energy to do as you’d expected, and now you’re stuck. You tried to clean the garage last weekend, but once you started, you found out that it would cost way too much money to haul away all the stuff you wanted to donate and you didn’t have the heart to throw it all into a landfill, so you gave up. You keep staring at the piano, imagining how much fun it would be to play for an hour (or two!), but then you see the stack of papers on your desk and can’t justify the self-indulgence. And somehow you don’t take care of the papers, either. Who has the strength? I’ll watch a movie instead.

Stop the world. I want to get off!

Ceci N’est Pas Un Backlog

I propose you start here: The Inbox is Not a Backlog.

Instead of treating The Inbox like a list of commitments, treat it as a list of options: ideas, possibilities, things to reconsider later, idle thoughts to spend 10 minutes thinking more deeply about on Friday, potentialities… but not obligations. You need to make it safe in your own mind to put things in The Inbox without assuming that you actually have to do them!

I tell my software development clients to do this, but they often struggle, because there are many people in their project community, each with their own needs. They have competing objectives. They have differing philosophies. They care about different things. Any change to their working environment requires consent and getting that consent takes effort. Some people simply don’t feel ready to try to treat their Backlogs as anything less than obligations to do things under threat of losing their job. And, you know, their managers and executives routinely remind them about this threat every week!

You have an advantage: it’s just you in there! You can choose. You can experiment with making it safe to see The Inbox as options, not obligations. Nobody else can see inside your head. You can try and fail and try and fail and try fail until you suddenly succeed. Until you feel the click. Until you start seeing The Inbox as a collection of options, not obligations.

Feeling Safe in The Inbox

When you see The Inbox as options instead of obligations, it becomes safe to capture everything in The Inbox. You’re not going to do it all, anyway. You can’t. You don’t have enough time, energy, and money to do it all. You’re going to have more ideas and you need the freedom to sit and think about them. To mull them over, even when you’re not in the shower. You’re going to need to negotiate with The Universe regarding what you can reasonably commit to and what you can’t. You’re going to need to make room for doing things for yourself, because if you don’t, then you will run entirely out of energy and everything will stop! (We call this “burnout” and even “depression”.)

When you make The Inbox a safe place to capture every little idea, these big things happen:

You let yourself have ideas without fear of having to do anything with them. Your creativity kicks into high gear—or at least springs back to life.
You build a daily practise of scratching tasks off your list. You literally practise saying “No” to The Universe, but inside your own mind, where it’s safe because they can’t hear you and you don’t have face their disappointment. You can build confidence in your “No”, so that you can say it when you need to say it.
You focus more deeply and fully on the tasks you actually do, so you complete them sooner and with more energy. Sometimes you even have fun doing them!
You do more of the things you want to do and fewer of the things that you don’t. (No, really!)
You feel more confident in the commitments you keep, because you have increasingly clear evidence of what you can do and what you can’t do, of what you have space to do and what you don’t. You become the reliable, helpful person that those well-meaning (or maybe not) adults taught you to become.

As the saying goes, if you can’t say “No”, then your “Yes” means nothing. I prefer to say this:

Once you make peace with saying “No” to folks, you recapture the purest joy that comes from being able to say “Yes!” and meaning it.

And that starts with seeing The Inbox as full of options, not obligations. You can choose.

Getting Started

Spend 10 minutes with some paper and a pen and write all your uncompleted tasks (and projects) down. Just write. Write down anything you’re worried about forgetting. Don’t edit anything yet; just write. Write down the things you’ve always wanted to do, but never found time to do. Write it all down and don’t read any of it. Write down all the little things, too. The obvious things. The mundane, everyday things. Just write. This is The Inbox.

How do you feel now?

Once you have The Inbox, you can decide what to do with those items: scratch some off, put some deadlines or appointments on your calendar, set a reminder for Friday to spend 20 minutes thinking more about That Project You Maybe Want To Do, and then pick some things that you’ve already committed to, or that you want to get out of the way, or that you genuinely want to do today. (What? Meeting my own needs? In this economy?!)

Now put The Inbox away. You don’t ever have to look at it again, unless you want to spend more time processing it. Maybe what you’ve done now is enough to clarify what you need to today, for the rest of the week, and to begin next week. Maybe on Monday you can spend 10 minutes with some paper and pen and do this all again.

This is enough to get started. You’re doing Getting Things Done! It’s happening!

At some point, rewriting The inbox every Monday is going to become annoying. Or you might need to do it more often. Or less often. This means you’re ready for the next trick. Maybe then you have the energy to read the book. Or to come back here for the next trick. Or to send me a complaint or ask me a question, so that I can write about it.

Epilogue, or Future Work

Once you feel comfortable seeing The Inbox as options, not obligations, then you can imagine seeing your Projects and Next Actions as merely options, not obligations. (🤯?)

Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal. Very young brains seem to behave a lot like adult brains in a hypnotic trance. If this is true, then you were literally hypnotized to believe what adults told you when you were a small child. This would explain why those Survival Rules seem automatic and impossible to ignore!