Executing Your Day’s Tasks

Put your daily to do list right in front of you while working

Once you’ve prepared your day’s to do list, put it prominently in front of you while working. If you are mobile, keep it in your pocket. This is easy if your list is on your phone, but there is special benefit to copying your day’s list onto a small piece of paper. The physical boundary between today’s tasks and everything else in your life is surprisingly effective to help you focus and reduce any unnecessary stress. If you are desk-bound, make it one of the few things that sit on your desk. As you complete each task, remove it from the list.

Live the plan

The life plan maximizes long-term joy by helping you generate what you should do next and why you should do it. Many of the benefits of a life plan require that your actions completely reflect what is written.

What if someone you knew well saw your life plan? How well would it match the person they know? What if someone were following you all the time comparing you to the paper? Would you want your kids to live the same contract? Would you want them to see yours?

Discipline yourself so that your actions only come from your to do list. Discipline does not describe a lack of freedom, but how you use it. You can’t be disciplined without one, and without discipline, you’ll never achieve what you would if you had it. Your purpose, goals, and tasks are a contract. You can choose what you are a disciple to, but live up to what you choose.

Ideally, every single action you ever take will come from your to do list and your curation process. This would mean that there are no random reactions, no unstructured deviations from the plan, and so on. Whenever you are doing anything, you should ask where this is on your life plan. If it isn’t there and needs to be, add it. If it isn’t there and doesn’t have a place, there is something better for you to spend your time on.

Intentionality requires being honest with yourself, not lying in the moment by excusing deviations from what it is you say you want because it is easy, convenient, or comfortable to do so. You abstain from those things that detract in any way from what it is you want, why it is you want it, and how it is you think you’ll get it.

What is most important might not be most important given current conditions

The simplest strategy each day is to begin your next highest priority task, barricade yourself until it is done, and repeat. But often, you’ll have to adjust from this ideal.

Always doing what is most important is the simplest but not the best strategy for achieving the greatest outcomes. To advance productivity beyond this level, one must remain aware of and take advantage of unforeseen circumstances during execution.

Shifting circumstances can reveal an unforeseen advantage or opportunity:¹ a convenience not previously expected, something that becomes very easy along the way to something else, a swell of positive emotion, a surplus of energy, and so on. Shifting circumstances can also be negative: an inconvenience not previously expected, something that becomes much harder as you proceed, a swell of negative emotion, a drop in energy, and the like.

Circumstances are always shifting. We ought to be resilient against these shifts when they directly contradict our intent, but also leverage them when they have the capacity to forward our intent. Like wind for a sailboat, we can posture ourselves both to contend with and leverage the shifting circumstances.

Achieve maximal productivity through flexible execution of the highest priority. When you face shifting conditions, ask yourself: “What can I do right now that would yield the greatest progress towards my goals?”

Your prioritized list will help you respond and fill in the gaps in a way that still generates the highest possible impact. It’s much easier to simply move down your list rather than need to think about them from scratch.

Handling the emotional drag of unexpected opportunities

We feel happy when we perceive ourselves to be making progress on worthwhile goals. When you conduct your tasks looking for and taking advantage of unforeseen opportunities, you will feel in the moment like your schedule is slipping and you aren’t getting as much done. This is because you are overly focusing on your short list of tasks and not measuring your overall impact. Focus on the impact.

When you realize that you have unexpected opportunities to take advantage of, revise your to do list. As silly as it seems, the act of adding the new items to your list will have a surprisingly strong effect on your sense that you are making progress. All of a sudden, the stress you feel from extra things to do will be replaced with the satisfaction of getting so many extra things done, and that satisfaction will propel you forward in your current projects and everything that follows.

Leveraging unexpected opportunities while aligning your emotional perspective with the greatest impact will drastically accelerate your productivity and dramatically increase the joy you feel in the work of each day.

Use up every drop of your daily resources

Be intense, even in the little things. Remembering that each task you work on from your daily to do list is the most direct step toward the greatest possible joy will alleviate the daily drudgery, no matter how mundane your present task may have seemed before.

If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing with your whole soul. Do not withhold from your maximal capacity when executing what you have decided is most important. Standards for success are set in planning, not execution, and until you reach them or encounter sufficient reasons to return to planning mode, you should carry out your intentions with all your emotional, mental, and physical capacity.

Do everything you can. If you want to feel deeply satisfied no matter the outcome, you have to reach the point where you can look yourself in the mirror and say there was nothing more you could do. The only way you’ll leverage the greatest proportion of motivation from your overarching purpose in your daily life is if you assume that every additional increment of action will have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome.

Executing the best ideas with the greatest possible resources

When you haphazardly decide how to spend your time, you will not only choose to pursue tasks that do not best advance what matters most, you will also have fewer resources left for the things that do.

Your to do list is an amazingly powerful tool for keeping your mental, emotional, and other resources focused on what is most important. When you write down all your ideas and organize them as described in the life plan, you will put the best resources towards what matters most.

Multiple times throughout each day, you should find yourself recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities to choose tasks of a higher priority. As you adopt this practice, you stand to gain massive increases in productivity through thinking about and actively selecting activities of greater importance than what you would otherwise do.

Great confidence, peace, and productivity are available for those who learn to navigate each day based on an intentional, well-reasoned prioritization. When you order your life by priority and intentionally direct your efforts to the highest impact, you feel zero stress or anxiety about what you don’t quite get to. You know and choose to prefer what is more important, and in achieving what is most important, you will have and feel more and better than you otherwise would.

Perform according to your purpose, not the expectations of others

Focus on your joy above lesser motivations. Purpose-driven performance will give you reasons to do what you are doing better and for longer than you would for a lesser motivation. How much of your behavior is based on your purpose, and how much is due to the expectations of others?

A person who operates for their own joy does not need to be motivated, promoted, or punished by others. They do not need to be supervised or micromanaged. They will do their best whether anyone is watching or not, and will also do their best no matter who might be offended by it.

Focus on your joy above others’ expectations. If you are doing something because it is the greatest contribution you can make to your joy, you are going to do it very differently than you would if you were just trying to avoid negative feedback from others. Sometimes, purpose-driven performance will require you to do what others will dislike and maybe even hate you for. Whenever you face a conflict between the expectations of others and your purpose, always go with your purpose.

The peace of the life plan as you get older or in the event of unexpected loss of capacity

As you get older, you will have less time and less energy. As you age, your productivity may continue to increase even as some parts of your body and mind decline due to the wisdom of experience, but sooner or later it will level off and decline. It is a sure thing, though the exact time varies due to factors within and outside of your control.

Whether through old age or accident, and whether permanently or forever, your capacity is going to wane. When it does, the life plan will help you feel greater satisfaction with what you can do no matter how much or how little that might be. There is no better way to prepare for the eventuality of a reduced output than recognizing and learning to cope with the fact that there is more than you could ever do even while you are in your prime.

As you grow comfortable contending with a never-ending to do list now, you will be able to instantly adjust to any decrease in capacity when the time comes, because you will already have adopted the system that enables you to feel fully satisfied and joyful in spite of the fact that you can never do everything you imagine doing. This is as smooth as fasting when you are already on a no-carb diet: you can instantly begin metabolizing stored fat without the prolonged discomfort of switching over from carbohydrates.

The productivity and emotional benefits of separating execution from planning

Planning and execution are substantially distinct activities. Commingling them reduces the effectiveness of both while increasing the resources required to do either. Planning and execution are completely different cognitive and emotional states.² Planning is when you articulate potential through design. Execution is when you actualize potential through action. Planning is infinite, while execution consists of discrete tasks. Planning takes intense courage, concentration, and hope, while execution requires the different kind of intensity of plodding through things until they are complete. Planning is open-ended, but execution is focused. Planning is proactive, but execution is reactive. Planning is free-form, but execution is organized. Planning is driven by inspiration, but execution is driven by discipline. Planning is imaginative, but execution is closed-minded. Planning is whispy, and execution is gritty.

One common example of mixing planning and execution is scrolling through social media. No one scrolls through social media to achieve a goal. You browse social media because you don’t know what is there, and then you get worked up about one thing or another as doing so were central to your prior purpose. You scroll through social media to find purpose, not to fulfill it. That will never make you feel as good as an intentional act that specifically advances your long-term joy more than anything else. A much more effective use of downtime would be to read a book.

Switching from planning mode to execution mode

Too few people ever bother thinking about what they are doing, why, and what alternative options they have. You have to think about your work before you do it. But if you want to get the most out of life with the least wasted effort and emotion, you need to learn how to separate the thinking and the working.

There is a difference between designing a machine and operating one. Planning is where you build the machine, and execution is where you run it. Relentlessly consider the expected outcomes of your actions when prioritizing and planning. But during execution, the only thing that matters is effort. Work like a maniac with laser focus on your stated plan.

Once you’ve completed your day’s to do list, you can and must shut planning out of your mind. In execution mode, you free up your mental and emotional resources for actually doing what you have already decided to do. You draw a box around the task at hand, and ignore the rest of the world. You exit the infinite and uncertain world of what might be, and shift into the well-defined realm of the discrete. This frees you from any anxiety and grossly curtails otherwise unbounded uncertainty. Everything that matters is on that little square of paper containing your day’s to do list.

It’s odd to talk about the need to robotically execute while discussing the need to live life with your whole soul, but these aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. During planning, you engage the exploratory capacity of your mental and emotional channels as if they were an ambient light. When you get into the execution state, you bridle your heart and mind toward the task at hand with the focus of a laser, avoiding the many distractions that would otherwise occur. During execution, there is no surplus energy available in execution mode for daydreaming, yearning, or second-guessing. What is a vital part of planning becomes a bottleneck in execution, and vice-versa. In short, when moving from planning to execution, you replace “if ”and “should” with “must.”

When to re-enter planning mode

Once you have set your priorities, the absolute only thing that matters is the very next thing. The only time anything else matters is when new information or an external event changes the priorities.

As you go through each day, you’ll come across new thoughts or new information that entail details outside of the scope of your day’s to do list. These could range from items pertaining to later in the week all the way to information that might cause you to reconsider your purpose.

With each piece of information, you’ll have to quickly decide to what degree to temporarily break out of the daily to do list mindset. It’s unlikely you’ll need to curate your master list outside of an official planning session. In almost every case, the emergent information should simply be added to the unsorted to do list. Even when changes occur, you only have to re-enter planning as far as necessary to yield the next task. For example, in the event that you complete your day’s tasks earlier than anticipated, just attack the highest priority item on your master to do list that fits your remaining resources.

When breaking your flow to note down ideas, you’ll want to return to the task at hand as quickly as possible. To understand why, realize that your mind’s ability to focus on a task is like you taking a hot shower. It’s better not to interrupt at all, but if you are going to, it’s very important to get back to it as soon as you can. The negative effects of cognitive frame breaks will increase geometrically with their length.³

Switching back and forth between modes is difficult and rarely done well

Planning and executing can’t be done at the same time, and it is surprisingly difficult to jump from one to the other when it would benefit to do so. Planning and execution are not equivalent tasks in difficulty or value. There are far fewer people who can plan than there are those who can execute. There are fewer still who can do both, as this requires not just the presence of two highly independent skills, but the rare ability to move between them at the appropriate time. This is the most difficult skill of the three, since it takes something special to be able to sense when the switch is needed without detracting from the whole focus needed to design or execute well.

Catch and do in the moment the little things that you will otherwise forget

While you need a system to capture all thoughts as you have them, you will inevitably encounter tasks that you can predict will suffer if you delay them. These could include short tasks that take less time to perform than to persist and recover from notes⁴ or creative tasks where inspiration has come upon you in the moment. Sometimes, you’ll be in a particular mindset where you are completely engaged in some type of work.⁵ In such circumstances, consider whether it is more efficient to simply complete a lower priority emergent task than it would be to queue it up for later.

Batch related tasks to reduce overhead and minimize context switches

When you transition between tasks with different contexts, it creates emotional and mental costs that are considerable, but not necessarily consciously recognized. You can reduce the number of context switches incurred in a day by batching together tasks that are related in some way.

Batching is an effective way to accomplish the greatest number of tasks with the lowest context switching overhead. Batching consists of consecutively executing related tasks to avoid the mental energy required to context switch. The principle here is simple: organize like things together and execute them as a group. For example, suppose you are a university teacher. You could batch together the blocks of time you spend teaching, time you spend grading (or even grading the same question across all tests at the same time), research meetings with students, and time you spend responding to student emails.

Batching promotes the priority of less important tasks based on shared overhead with more important tasks. Every task has some sort of startup cost. Batching takes advantage of already paid startup costs, executing other activities that share that startup cost in order to minimize costs across tasks. A batching shopper would visit adjacent stores for lower priority purchases because she is already there. A batching woodworker would use the jig for other jobs that need it, even if they aren’t as high a priority as those that don’t.

Batching takes advantage of the fact that the net benefit of a certain action is a function of its cost. When a higher priority task necessitates at least some of the cost required for lower priority tasks, the net benefit of those tasks increases, and might become high enough to boost the priority to above the threshold of execution. This is frequently the case even when the lower priority item still has additional cost. In both examples provided above, the additional tasks require additional time, even though a great deal of the time they would take from scratch has been reduced by the higher priority task. It’s an easy calculation to make when you take the long-term view: Will the expense of slightly more now result in much less expense later? If so, do it.

Sometimes, batchable tasks will naturally exist and cluster in your process of generating a to do list. Most times, you will have to intentionally increase the occurrence of task batching through saving them up.

When you come across a low urgency task, think about whether there is a way to queue it for later in ways that can take advantage of the benefits of batching (items of similar context or overlapping overhead), or unexpected opportunities (so that you have something meaningful to do when surprised with unexpected delays). If any of these is the case, it is wise to save the low urgency task for a later date, and to move on in your to do list. For example, if you come across a book you would like to read, but that is not urgent, you could choose to store it in your car in anticipation of some unexpected delay, or save it for an upcoming plane trip.

Batching is one of many tactics for productivity that will cause you to act in ways that differ significantly from your peers. For example, if you batch your work emails, you will need to inform your colleagues that they should not expect immediate replies from you. While you can give them a maximum timeframe when they can expect a response (say, every 24 hours in a business day), you should give them another method of notifying you in the event they need your urgent reply (such as a phone call or knock on your office door).

Batching is a single technique that will result in such an immense gain in productivity that you will not believe it until you try it.⁶

Routines reduce the cost of context switches

Routines form the brainless scaffold around which you plan and execute variable tasks. The human mind has an extraordinary capacity to get used to things. One aspect of this ability is how we begin to treat routines consisting of many steps as one thing. Think of the many things you do often to verify this. For example, think of all the individual steps in showering, but because you do the same thing every time, you treat it as just one thing. There is little to no cost in switching between the subtasks of showering because it is routinized. It doesn’t require your active attention.

Routinize every repetitive thing in your life. For example, consider converting at least some portion of your eating, workout, sleeping, and bathroom activities into a routine. By making every repetitive, unavoidable, overhead task as close to a routine as possible, you will preserve the most resources for what matters the most.

Routines can become a double-edged sword in the sense that the power they lend in removing things from your awareness also makes it easy to miss cues that it is time to change them up.

You can gain great efficiency from recognizing what events in your life you can reduce to habit through making them a thoughtless routine, but you still need to openly seek for how you can improve them. For example, if you’ve created a routine of your workout plans, make it better by adding the habit of listening to thought-provoking podcasts while working out.

Routines should be noticed and discontinued when they no longer serve their intended purpose. “Because we always have” is not a good reason for doing anything. The existence of something suggests there is a reason for it, and a reason for looking for that reason, but it is not itself a reason.⁷ Who hasn’t attended a recurring meeting that had no purpose?

As a special note, routinization is a massive potential efficiency gain for parents. So much about a child’s life is repetitive, but parents tend to only infrequently treat it that way. Get into routines in everything that makes sense. Only leave variable the things that provide value in doing so. Look carefully at your schedule. Everything from meals to daily activities can be routinized. Even when variety needs to be preserved, loose routines can still vastly reduce the energy required to take care of daily necessities. For example, if every Monday is Mexican night, that makes it much simpler to plan and execute dinners and even to do the grocery shopping. If a stay at home mother plans recess where kids go outside to play every day from 2-3pm, that vastly simplifies a chunk of her daily life, as well as gives structure to the kids, who now can look forward to that each day. Get creative!

Learning when to ease up on the rigidity

While you are new to the life plan paradigm, you will want to be as exacting as you can. Over the years, you’ll reach a point where your purpose becomes so engrained within you that the process itself becomes sometimes redundant.⁸

While living with rigid exactitude to written plans presents one important level of discipline, it is also the gateway to a greater form, which embraces the purpose so well that the rigidity begins being more of a hinderance to it rather than a benefit. When you become this seasoned, you will notice situations where your dedication to your overarching purpose requires you to deviate from the plan as written, whether at the task or goal level.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can skip directly to the advanced, more flexible stage of the life plan without a prolonged period of strictly adhering to your plan. The direct implementation of a purpose is not a shortcut. It is not easier than what is otherwise described here—it is harder. Flexibility is done because it advances the purpose further than a rigid approach can, not to provide a shortcut to those unwilling to advance their purpose as much as strictness will. While you fail to live a life plan as written, you will never be capable of doing something better.