9 ms·

Forget the ‘To-Do’ List, You Need a ‘Stop Doing’ List

211 points by jeremynixon 12y ago

Mikho 12y ago
Nice piece. Get rid of excuses to continue to procrastinate and not get results. Also, well aligned with the Pareto principle: just do that 20% that get you results and improvement.
- rhizome 12y ago
  Surely you aren't serious. If you "just do" the 20%, then that effort is itself subject to Pareto.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    But surely a diminishing returns Pareto?
    - rhizome 12y ago
      Diminishing inputs, too.
minikites 12y ago
The last point ties in with the pg essay "What doesn't seem like work": http://paulgraham.com/work.html http://paulgraham.com/work.html Following your "passion" is dumb, find something that you think is okay that other people find unpleasant.
- s3r3nity 12y ago
  I always loved Cal Newport's take on this - "'Follow Your Passion' is bad advice" http://99u.com/videos/22339/cal-newport-follow-your-passion-is-bad-advice http://99u.com/videos/22339/cal-newport-follow-your-passion-...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- hackaflocka 12y ago
  The importance of habits: http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html 1. If you find your work boring, and don't make enough money at it, then quit and find something that either makes you money or stokes your passion. 2. If you find your work boring, but you make plenty of money at it, then find side-passions. 3. If your work stokes your passion, but you mooch off other people to make ends meet, it's not a great way to live. 4. It's easy to be passionate about something. But will you be able to sustain the passion for years? Through the ups and downs, and the late-nights and the disappointments?
lqdc13 12y ago
I am not sure if the logic makes sense for everyone. If I had 10 years to live and got $20 million, I would immediately stop working and start playing video games to get as much in as possible before I die.
- asdfologist 12y ago
  And how does that contradict the logic of the article? It basically says to spend your time doing something you're passionate about. If that's video games, then so be it.
  - lqdc13 12y ago
    Because you can't survive playing video games. If the final goal is sort of hedonistic lifestyle, it is sometimes best to do the exact opposite of what you want to end up doing to maximize the time actually enjoying the lifestyle. Sort of like you see a person setting up a hammock to lie in comfort and enjoy the beach. You tell him to stop setting up the hammock and just start enjoying the beach. Assuming that the monetary restrictions no longer apply is not useful for almost any hedonistic outcome.
    - javert 12y ago
      You probably can survive almost just playing video games. Get on welfare, live in a trailer park in the southern US. You probably have to be classified as "disabled" but doctors hand that out like candy these days. My aunt gets about $900 a month from the government and lives in subsidized housing, so that she only has to pay about $200 a month in rent. So income-wise she's doing a lot better than me (I am a grad student).
      - whybroke 12y ago
        So I'm curious, is this nonsense made up just to give bad advice to potential competitors or is it to stimulate an endless smoldering far right rage at imagined crimes in a fabicated world?
barrkel 12y ago
There's something ironic about the heavy emphasis on time coming from Time, a magazine I typically associate with waiting rooms.
calinet6 12y ago
Aside from the profound conclusions and hyperbolic examples, this is just some darned practical advice taken at face value. The value of focus is highly underrated. You don't need to do everything, and often doing everything 'on your list' means you're not devoting the time you should be to more important things; things that may not be on your list, or may not even be listable, or might just be doing the things on your list better. Devote yourself to focusing on one thing, shed the things that don't matter, and you might find a quality of execution you never realized. This is something I learned perhaps too late in my career so far. I feel I would have advanced more and faster and achieved better results if I had stopped doing things that weren't tightly focused—not only on what I needed, but on what my company needed and what our customers needed.
- rsync 12y ago
  The mantra I repeat to myself is "context switches are expensive". I've internalized this across many different disciplines (whether the workings of a CPU or the workings of my kids going to school) and even now, I need to repeat those four words to myself quite frequently. Context switches are expensive.
Centreal 12y ago
Pain-axis is enormously difficult/distressing to codify. Stopping still has barely survived as logic and fact worth recording — as actionable emotional-intelligence.
nbaksalyar 12y ago
"Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do." — John Carmack
jqm 12y ago
If I had less than 10 years to live and 20 million dollars I would do exactly what I do right now. I'd just be doing it in a nicer place (and probably be wearing more expensive pants).
- iqonik 12y ago
  I'd also be in a nicer place but hopefully minus the pants. That is the dream.
brongondwana 12y ago
What annoys me about a lot of time management advice is the same thing that annoys me about bucket lists. Acting as if the entire measure of the value of your life is how "efficiently" you spend every second. I totally agree about having a "stop doing" list, because that shit can eat up your whole life on stuff that you didn't actually enjoy. But leaving space for coincidence and serendipity is important too. And doing useless things sometimes, so that when you DO need more time, you have something left to give up that's not important to you. If you're already maxed out with valuable uses of your time, there's no room to add something else. (crossover: decluttering and the "get rid of something before you add something")
- lmm 12y ago
  > And doing useless things sometimes, so that when you DO need more time, you have something left to give up that's not important to you. If you're already maxed out with valuable uses of your time, there's no room to add something else. That makes no sense. At any given time you do the most valuable things available. When something else comes up, either it's more valuable than the least valuable thing you're currently doing - in which case great, you do it instead of that - or it's not, in which case why would you want to do it? When I found myself unexpectedly in a relationship I needed more time, so I stopped doing taekwando and dropped out of my roleplaying campaign as soon as there was a story-appropriate point to do so. Losing those things hurt, but I knew I was replacing them with something better. If I'd instead been keeping n nights a week free in case something comes up, what would I have gained? I'd just have been less happy in the weeks before that.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I've always hated the "you have all the money in the world and ten years left" type questions. Mostly because I have no idea what I would do.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  You have no idea, or you have ideas and you second guess them, thinking them trite or meaningless? I legitimately ask, because I had the same problem for a long time. It wasn't that I didn't know what I wanted to do, it was that I couldn't focus on just one thing, and I couldn't figure out what the meaning of it was, why any of it was important. When I realized that it doesn't matter for things to be important, I was able to get over my hangups and get to the things that I really, actually wanted to do. When answering the question of "what would you do if you had limitless resources", you have to discard cultural pressures, because cultural pressures apply an artificial restriction to the "limitless resources" conceit of the thought experiment. If you find yourself not liking your answers then, you have to sit down and figure out why. Keep climbing up the ladder of "why?". Why does it bother you? And why is that reason important? Why do those conditions that make it important exist?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    Most of the things that cross my mind are cliche and I know from experience I would not actually find them all that satisfying. It's possible that I would keep doing exactly what I am doing now, which I don't know whether to consider a blessing or curse. Am I living my dreams, or do I have no dreams?
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      I did an exercise one time in which I had to write down, in as much detail, my "ideal" day. The exercise was structured around a conceit that there was a magical genie who would grant you everything you wanted, but only if you could describe it in detail, and only in the detail that you describe it. I found it helpful. I learned a lot about what I want from it. It took me a while to finish and ended up being several pages long. It helped when I realized that the trick is to describe lifestyle, not possessions obtained or goals achieved. That's really the important thing. I realized that most of the goals I had created were vague, barely thought-through assumptions that would supposedly make that lifestyle possible. But those two things aren't really connected. So now, I do some freelancing for 20 hours a week and the rest of the week is mine. I've achieved 80% of my lifestyle goals and it was mostly about rearranging the things I already had in my life. I spend the rest of the week working on projects that will hopefully get me the other 20%.
thebear 12y ago
"Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
thejerz 12y ago
"The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes." -- Tony Blair
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  That guy could have said no a couple more times.
thejerz 12y ago
"I'm proud of the things we've done -- but I'm more proud of everything we didn't do." -- Steve Jobs
glennericksen 12y ago
Someone once told me that what we need are three lists. A to-do list, a stop doing list, and a don't do list. I don't always end up with three lists, but the principle serves me well.
n72 12y ago
Ironically, I need to stop doing my to-do list (ActiveInbox for me.) I've actually found it's become somewhat addictive. I think it's the unconscious feeling that I'm being productive and it actually keeps me from doing things I might enjoy. I've started to time box my to-do listing. I wouldn't be surprised if this is not an uncommon situation.
sopooneo 12y ago
"...it may be worth-while for you to remember that you have as much time as anyone else — twenty-four hours a day". I don't think this is fair. If you are poor and uneducated, you have to spend more time working just to provide basic needs. So you don't have as much time available as those who are better off.
- rtpg 12y ago
  Too true. It's important not to forget that, at least in the US, we find it acceptable that there are people who have to work more than 1.5 full-time jobs to survive.
- avalaunch 12y ago
  This is very true. The article also didn't take into account that some people need different amounts of sleep each night to function properly. There's a big difference between needing 6 hours and needing 10 hours.
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  Anyone that has kids doesn't has time-choice compared with those who don't. I'd guess 3+ hours a day average, less weekdays and more on weekends. Combine that with poor and there really isn't much time available outside sleep.
  - steve_barham 12y ago
    They did have time-choice; they chose to allocate a substantial portion of it to having children.
    - calibraxis 12y ago
      Not in a meaningful sense, given that the species should probably have a next generation. It's work that needs to be done. Society can make the work a lot less onerous, restoring that time-choice. (And various societies through time had quite sensible solutions, though of course war and violence destroys sensible living arrangements.) For instance, the common atomized family is incredibly inefficient duplication of work.
smegel 12y ago
To me, a To-Do list is just about prioritization. 'Stop Doing' the stuff at the bottom of the list.
moron4hire 12y ago
I don't have deadlines for tasks. I have start times only. While that technically means the start time of task #2 is essentially a deadline for task #1, I find it a lot more motivating to think of it in this way. It keeps the notion that not finishing today's task is preventing tomorrow's task from starting at the front and center.
pbreit 12y ago
To don't.
raminassemi 12y ago
Reminds me of Warren Buffett's "Avoid At All Cost" list or Steli's "Not To Do" list: http://blog.close.io/not-to-do-list http://blog.close.io/not-to-do-list
frade33 12y ago
Remove distractions = More Productivity. Simple as that.

211 points by jeremynixon 12y ago

Mikho 12y ago

Nice piece. Get rid of excuses to continue to procrastinate and not get results. Also, well aligned with the Pareto principle: just do that 20% that get you results and improvement.

rhizome 12y ago
Surely you aren't serious. If you "just do" the 20%, then that effort is itself subject to Pareto.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  But surely a diminishing returns Pareto?
  - rhizome 12y ago
    Diminishing inputs, too.

minikites 12y ago

The last point ties in with the pg essay "What doesn't seem like work": http://paulgraham.com/work.html http://paulgraham.com/work.html Following your "passion" is dumb, find something that you think is okay that other people find unpleasant.

s3r3nity 12y ago
I always loved Cal Newport's take on this - "'Follow Your Passion' is bad advice" http://99u.com/videos/22339/cal-newport-follow-your-passion-is-bad-advice http://99u.com/videos/22339/cal-newport-follow-your-passion-...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
hackaflocka 12y ago
The importance of habits: http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html 1. If you find your work boring, and don't make enough money at it, then quit and find something that either makes you money or stokes your passion. 2. If you find your work boring, but you make plenty of money at it, then find side-passions. 3. If your work stokes your passion, but you mooch off other people to make ends meet, it's not a great way to live. 4. It's easy to be passionate about something. But will you be able to sustain the passion for years? Through the ups and downs, and the late-nights and the disappointments?

lqdc13 12y ago

I am not sure if the logic makes sense for everyone. If I had 10 years to live and got $20 million, I would immediately stop working and start playing video games to get as much in as possible before I die.

asdfologist 12y ago
And how does that contradict the logic of the article? It basically says to spend your time doing something you're passionate about. If that's video games, then so be it.
- lqdc13 12y ago
  Because you can't survive playing video games. If the final goal is sort of hedonistic lifestyle, it is sometimes best to do the exact opposite of what you want to end up doing to maximize the time actually enjoying the lifestyle. Sort of like you see a person setting up a hammock to lie in comfort and enjoy the beach. You tell him to stop setting up the hammock and just start enjoying the beach. Assuming that the monetary restrictions no longer apply is not useful for almost any hedonistic outcome.
  - javert 12y ago
    You probably can survive almost just playing video games. Get on welfare, live in a trailer park in the southern US. You probably have to be classified as "disabled" but doctors hand that out like candy these days. My aunt gets about $900 a month from the government and lives in subsidized housing, so that she only has to pay about $200 a month in rent. So income-wise she's doing a lot better than me (I am a grad student).
    - whybroke 12y ago
      So I'm curious, is this nonsense made up just to give bad advice to potential competitors or is it to stimulate an endless smoldering far right rage at imagined crimes in a fabicated world?

barrkel 12y ago

There's something ironic about the heavy emphasis on time coming from Time, a magazine I typically associate with waiting rooms.

calinet6 12y ago

Aside from the profound conclusions and hyperbolic examples, this is just some darned practical advice taken at face value. The value of focus is highly underrated. You don't need to do everything, and often doing everything 'on your list' means you're not devoting the time you should be to more important things; things that may not be on your list, or may not even be listable, or might just be doing the things on your list better. Devote yourself to focusing on one thing, shed the things that don't matter, and you might find a quality of execution you never realized. This is something I learned perhaps too late in my career so far. I feel I would have advanced more and faster and achieved better results if I had stopped doing things that weren't tightly focused—not only on what I needed, but on what my company needed and what our customers needed.

rsync 12y ago
The mantra I repeat to myself is "context switches are expensive". I've internalized this across many different disciplines (whether the workings of a CPU or the workings of my kids going to school) and even now, I need to repeat those four words to myself quite frequently. Context switches are expensive.

Centreal 12y ago

Pain-axis is enormously difficult/distressing to codify. Stopping still has barely survived as logic and fact worth recording — as actionable emotional-intelligence.

nbaksalyar 12y ago

"Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do." — John Carmack

jqm 12y ago

If I had less than 10 years to live and 20 million dollars I would do exactly what I do right now. I'd just be doing it in a nicer place (and probably be wearing more expensive pants).

iqonik 12y ago
I'd also be in a nicer place but hopefully minus the pants. That is the dream.

brongondwana 12y ago

What annoys me about a lot of time management advice is the same thing that annoys me about bucket lists. Acting as if the entire measure of the value of your life is how "efficiently" you spend every second. I totally agree about having a "stop doing" list, because that shit can eat up your whole life on stuff that you didn't actually enjoy. But leaving space for coincidence and serendipity is important too. And doing useless things sometimes, so that when you DO need more time, you have something left to give up that's not important to you. If you're already maxed out with valuable uses of your time, there's no room to add something else. (crossover: decluttering and the "get rid of something before you add something")

lmm 12y ago
> And doing useless things sometimes, so that when you DO need more time, you have something left to give up that's not important to you. If you're already maxed out with valuable uses of your time, there's no room to add something else. That makes no sense. At any given time you do the most valuable things available. When something else comes up, either it's more valuable than the least valuable thing you're currently doing - in which case great, you do it instead of that - or it's not, in which case why would you want to do it? When I found myself unexpectedly in a relationship I needed more time, so I stopped doing taekwando and dropped out of my roleplaying campaign as soon as there was a story-appropriate point to do so. Losing those things hurt, but I knew I was replacing them with something better. If I'd instead been keeping n nights a week free in case something comes up, what would I have gained? I'd just have been less happy in the weeks before that.

sliverstorm 12y ago

I've always hated the "you have all the money in the world and ten years left" type questions. Mostly because I have no idea what I would do.

moron4hire 12y ago
You have no idea, or you have ideas and you second guess them, thinking them trite or meaningless? I legitimately ask, because I had the same problem for a long time. It wasn't that I didn't know what I wanted to do, it was that I couldn't focus on just one thing, and I couldn't figure out what the meaning of it was, why any of it was important. When I realized that it doesn't matter for things to be important, I was able to get over my hangups and get to the things that I really, actually wanted to do. When answering the question of "what would you do if you had limitless resources", you have to discard cultural pressures, because cultural pressures apply an artificial restriction to the "limitless resources" conceit of the thought experiment. If you find yourself not liking your answers then, you have to sit down and figure out why. Keep climbing up the ladder of "why?". Why does it bother you? And why is that reason important? Why do those conditions that make it important exist?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Most of the things that cross my mind are cliche and I know from experience I would not actually find them all that satisfying. It's possible that I would keep doing exactly what I am doing now, which I don't know whether to consider a blessing or curse. Am I living my dreams, or do I have no dreams?
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    I did an exercise one time in which I had to write down, in as much detail, my "ideal" day. The exercise was structured around a conceit that there was a magical genie who would grant you everything you wanted, but only if you could describe it in detail, and only in the detail that you describe it. I found it helpful. I learned a lot about what I want from it. It took me a while to finish and ended up being several pages long. It helped when I realized that the trick is to describe lifestyle, not possessions obtained or goals achieved. That's really the important thing. I realized that most of the goals I had created were vague, barely thought-through assumptions that would supposedly make that lifestyle possible. But those two things aren't really connected. So now, I do some freelancing for 20 hours a week and the rest of the week is mine. I've achieved 80% of my lifestyle goals and it was mostly about rearranging the things I already had in my life. I spend the rest of the week working on projects that will hopefully get me the other 20%.

thebear 12y ago

"Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

thejerz 12y ago

"The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes." -- Tony Blair

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
robotresearcher 12y ago
That guy could have said no a couple more times.

thejerz 12y ago

"I'm proud of the things we've done -- but I'm more proud of everything we didn't do." -- Steve Jobs

glennericksen 12y ago

Someone once told me that what we need are three lists. A to-do list, a stop doing list, and a don't do list. I don't always end up with three lists, but the principle serves me well.

n72 12y ago

Ironically, I need to stop doing my to-do list (ActiveInbox for me.) I've actually found it's become somewhat addictive. I think it's the unconscious feeling that I'm being productive and it actually keeps me from doing things I might enjoy. I've started to time box my to-do listing. I wouldn't be surprised if this is not an uncommon situation.

sopooneo 12y ago

"...it may be worth-while for you to remember that you have as much time as anyone else — twenty-four hours a day". I don't think this is fair. If you are poor and uneducated, you have to spend more time working just to provide basic needs. So you don't have as much time available as those who are better off.

rtpg 12y ago
Too true. It's important not to forget that, at least in the US, we find it acceptable that there are people who have to work more than 1.5 full-time jobs to survive.
avalaunch 12y ago
This is very true. The article also didn't take into account that some people need different amounts of sleep each night to function properly. There's a big difference between needing 6 hours and needing 10 hours.
Gustomaximus 12y ago
Anyone that has kids doesn't has time-choice compared with those who don't. I'd guess 3+ hours a day average, less weekdays and more on weekends. Combine that with poor and there really isn't much time available outside sleep.
- steve_barham 12y ago
  They did have time-choice; they chose to allocate a substantial portion of it to having children.
  - calibraxis 12y ago
    Not in a meaningful sense, given that the species should probably have a next generation. It's work that needs to be done. Society can make the work a lot less onerous, restoring that time-choice. (And various societies through time had quite sensible solutions, though of course war and violence destroys sensible living arrangements.) For instance, the common atomized family is incredibly inefficient duplication of work.

smegel 12y ago

To me, a To-Do list is just about prioritization. 'Stop Doing' the stuff at the bottom of the list.

moron4hire 12y ago

I don't have deadlines for tasks. I have start times only. While that technically means the start time of task #2 is essentially a deadline for task #1, I find it a lot more motivating to think of it in this way. It keeps the notion that not finishing today's task is preventing tomorrow's task from starting at the front and center.

pbreit 12y ago

To don't.

raminassemi 12y ago

Reminds me of Warren Buffett's "Avoid At All Cost" list or Steli's "Not To Do" list: http://blog.close.io/not-to-do-list http://blog.close.io/not-to-do-list

frade33 12y ago

Remove distractions = More Productivity. Simple as that.