How a "Not Now" List De-stressed Me
Personal productivity1 is an unsolved problem for many of us. This is my journey:
Milestone 1
Last year, I started maintaining a todo list 2. I found that putting the tasks in the list freed my mind from having to remember everything lest I forget. This reduced stress. One of the things I’m proud of is that I don’t forget tasks and need other people to follow up after me. But this, in turn, causes the stress of having to track everything mentally. A todo list gave me the reassurance that I won’t miss anything. It let me focus on the task I’m working on, rather than keeping other tasks at the back of my mind. In other words, I was able to allocate all my mental space to what I’m doing, which is more productive. And makes me feel calmer, while multitasking3 makes me feel rushed.
So, using a todo list was better than not.
Milestone 2
I found that different kinds of todo items kept getting mixed together. I was going to make a bunch of Youtube videos, so I had a bunch of todo items, one for each video, which were getting jumbled together with other tasks like researching some technology. I again lost the clarity that I had.
So I created multiple todo lists in Basecamp, and that worked for a while.
Milestone 3
I found that Basecamp wasn’t flexible enough for me. I found that I wanted some todo lists expanded, and some collapsed. So switched to Notion:
I wanted to see all these at a glance. In Basecamp, if I created a “Your well-being” list and todo items like “Physical” and “Emotional” within it:
The points within Emotional, like Square breathing, were a click away, no longer visible at a glance, which I need them to be, since I want to do them every day but end up forgetting. So Basecamp didn’t work. I switched to Notion for the deep nesting along with being able to see the deeply nested items at a glance.
Milestone 4
Things were getting better with each milestone, but one problem remained: I was trying to do too many things at once, so I was still stressed. If you have a list of 100 todos, no matter how you slice and dice it, you still have 100 tasks to do.
Based on a friend’s suggestion, I created a Not Now list:
All the items I’m not working on are no longer visible, unless I navigate to Not now. They don’t distract me. They don’t take my focus away from what I’m doing. They don’t pull my mind in ten different directions at once, making me stressed that I’m unable to do them all. I no longer have ten tasks half-done, lying around to compete for my attention.
If I remembered one of the tasks I decided not to work on, like making Youtube videos, I’d remind myself that I already decided that I’m not working on it, and stop thinking about it. Each task imposes some overhead on my mind, and a significant part of this overhead is from remembering, thinking about, planning and scheduling the task. When I put something in the Not now list, all of that overhead goes away.
Our houses have drawers we put things into and close. The house would be a mess if we didn’t have drawers, if everything were thrown on the floor for you to deal with 24x7. Similarly, the Not now list is a mental drawer I put things into and close, so that I don’t have to deal with them.
This has resulted in a lot of peace of mind. After a long time, I now have free time, times when I search for something to do, rather than drowning under a sea of tasks. I feel more relaxed, and watched a movie for the first time in 6 months!
If you’re feeling stressed, create your own Not now list.
If you want to improve your personal productivity, you need to first define your goal. What do you mean by personal productivity? Are you missing deadlines? Are you busy with the urgent, never making time for the important? Are you leaving 10 things half-done instead of completing five? Are you stressed? You need to identify your problems before you begin solving them. Otherwise, it’s like getting into your car and starting to drive without knowing where you’re going. This is a problem with a lot of the material on personal productivity. They jump to solutions without defining the problem, implicitly assuming that their problem is yours.
First in Basecamp, then in Notion.
In the sense of having 80% focus on what I’m doing and 20% on tracking the remaining todo items mentally.