To Do List or Not To Do List

why I'm abandoning the only productivity hack that ever worked for me

I used to think that being productive was the way to alleviate my shame and anxiety. If only I could come up with a sure-fire system that would help me remember what I need to do, and motivate me to actually get shit done, then surely I would be free of the shame and anxiety of feeling like I was lazy, not pulling my weight, squandering my life. Right?

Like so many of us, I tried a million hacks—fancy planners, online calendars, apps like Notion and Trillo and a million other—but none of them ever worked because I never followed through. But then I came up with a system that really and truly worked: a simple, daily, rolling to-do list in the Notes app on my phone. Each day I would copy and paste the previous day’s list into a new note, and at the top I put appointments I had to show up for in person or online, and I set alarms to remind myself. Then below was a rolling list of things I needed and wanted to do, with a little circle beside it for checking it off.¹

“wine dark” is the purple/blue I painted our bedroom

This system worked astonishingly well for about four years, and I felt inordinately proud of the fact that I had created a habit of doing this almost every single day. I often created my to-do list before I even got out of bed in the morning, and felt virtuous that I had started getting shit done before my feet even hit the floor.

For four years, almost every single day. Sometimes I took off weekends, and on rare vacations I would not create a new note. Sometimes the to-do list was extremely granular, like the one above, which was from the home reno marathon last autumn. Sometimes it was much less so, but generally I felt I needed that granularity to feel motivated on the front end and accomplished on the back end. Often I would add items to my list after the fact so that I could check them off, and have the satisfaction of seeing how productive I had been that day.

And yet, I never stopped being plagued by the low-grade anxiety and shame that I was not doing enough, not pulling my weight. I still compared myself and my productivity to people I consider peers and always felt behind. Even though it frustrated and exasperated Joel to no end, I felt incredibly anxious if I spent part of the day staring out the window (“spinning out in space, gathering stardust”)—or worse, binge-watching some old TV show (most recently: House, currently: ER)—while he was working at a desk 40 hours a week and still the kitchen wasn’t clean and the laundry piled up. Just to be clear—it wasn’t what I did or didn’t do that frustrated and exasperated Joel, it was my constant checking in with him, to ask if he was upset with me. “No, no I am not,” he would say in a faux stern voice, “but I am going to get upset if you keep asking me that. I know this is how you work. Your work is important. I love supporting your work.”

No matter how many circles in my Notes app got check off and turned yellow by the end of the day, I was often consumed with anxiety about it not being enough. When we went on a two week vacation in October (a meandering trip the the Florida panhandle, camping in our van), the anxiety vanished. Originally I had thought this would be a writing vacation, and that I would use down time to get ahead on newsletter articles and get back into the flow with my novel. But this was our first real vacation of any length in years and years, and quickly I abandoned all aspirations to do anything at all. Even things I generally love—long walks near water, cooking great food, making s’mores around a campfire—gave way to sleep and slothfulness if that’s what I felt like. I spent a lot of time laying in the bed in the back of the van with the doors open, reading a trashy book and gazing out at nature and the sky.

The anxiety I had been managing for … well, forever, really, with a few brief periods of relief … was just gone. Anxiety for me is less about worry, but rather a very visceral sensation in my gut and chest. Often free-floating, about noting in particular. It feels like a physical illness that sucks dry my motivation, my ability to focus, my ability to function. It feels a lot like trying to run through molasses. It makes being productive really really hard.

As we meandered our way home at the end of two blissful weeks on the road, I found myself dreading the to-do list. All of the stuff I had to do I was stuff I was actually looking forward to—I was co-teaching the Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice² course with KR and Meg, Meg and I were planning our Coming Home course³, I was taking KR’s year-long novel-writing course and was excited to jump back into working on my murder mystery. And yet, the thought of opening up my Notes app and writing it all down was now filling me with dread.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t getting shit done that was making me anxious, but productivity culture itself. The notion that the measure of a person’s day, week, year, life was how productive they were. Maybe the demand to be productive, and all my efforts to quantify and track and gamify and monitor every fucking thing in my life—not just the To-Do list, but steps counted, circles closed on my Apple watch, subscriber counts and open rates and views on IG and substack—had now actually become the problem. Maybe my productivity hack—my precious To-Do list system that I was so proud of being so consistent with lo these many years—maybe this hack was no longer the solution to my “dysfunction,” but had actually become the cause of it. I decided to see, and went cold turkey.

It was surprisingly difficult.

Not difficult to continue to be as productive as I needed and wanted to be. That actually came really easily, which was also surprising. But letting go of the hack, of the ritual of making my To-Do list every morning, was really really hard. It felt wrong. I felt like I was losing—losing a streak, losing something I felt really proud of, as weird and silly as that probably sounds. Proud of a To-Do list? But I was. My whole life I felt scattered and incompetent and unable to follow through on almost anything that mattered, but this productivity hack, simple as it was, was something I had created for myself and it worked and I had stuck with it almost daily for 4 whole years.

The thing is, I no longer feel scattered and incompetent and unable to follow through on the things that matter to me. But until I gave up on my To-Do list, I still felt anxious and worried all the time that I wasn’t doing enough. And when I let the To-Do list go, difficult as that was, my anxiety left too. Or rather, after my vacation, it just never came back. I decided then to get rid of all the counting and monitoring and gamification of my life, and try to just focus on two things: the things I need to do, and the things I want to do. Often they are the same thing because I now have an enviable life made up of mostly things I love—writing, teaching, hosting DDS. When the things I need to do are not anything I want to do—opening mail, taking out the trash, cleaning the kitchen—I remind myself that I can do hard things. That these quotidian things are just the stuff of life. But also, I remind myself that almost none of the need-but-don’t-want-to-do things are life-or-death. The trash comes every week (I missed it this morning!). Late fees on unpaid parking fines are no fun, but they are sometimes the price of pursuing what I love. Without shame and self-recrimination, a messy kitchen and an unpaid dentist bill are also just the stuff of life.

I still haven’t touched up the wine dark … and yet we sleep fine at night

Very little has actually changed since I gave up the To-Do list—maybe I forget things a little more, but I also get shit done. The main difference is that I am not caught up in an endless loop of anxiety about whether or not I’m being productive. I’m no longer counting and tracking my life, I’m just living it.

It’s possible that the reason I have been able to get to this point is precisely because my bespoke productivity hack really worked, and I just outgrew it. I think that’s probably at least partly true. And I certainly don’t want anyone to misread this: if you have hacks that help you get through the day, that help you be productive in the ways you need and want to be, GREAT. I am certainly not advocating for anyone to give anything up if it is working. If you had suggested I give up my To-Do list system even half a year ago, I would have said, no way, you’re nuts, I can’t survive without this. I’m a big believer in whatever works. No shame. Never any shame.

But I do think it’s interesting that the autumn I decided to give up my productivity hack was also the season of my life when almost all of my work has become profoundly collaborative. Having colleagues and a community that I am working with on most of my big projects has been a revelation. Working toward a common goal with and for other people is extremely motivating.

Body doubling with my community in DDS helps me focus like nothing else (I’m in a body doubling session, which we call Studio Time, right now as I type this). We have almost daily zoom body doubling sessions, but lately I’ve also been starting a text-only check in on some weekends when I need a little extra motivation to get something done—I make a post in DDS and then in the comments folks check in about what they are working on and then check back in periodically about how it’s going. We give each other cheerleading when things go well, and commiseration (but never judgment or shame) when they don’t. (I’ve been thinking about offering such a body-doubling post periodically here for on The Spiral Lab and am wondering what people would think about that? Maybe this coming weekend.)

I think it’s such a contemporary phenomenon, this idea that we have to hack and gamify and quantify our lives. In a culture of runaway growth that resembles nothing so much as cancer, we have been made into our own taskmasters. We have been cajoled and coerced into systems and hacks that then become the source, rather than the cure, of our anxiety and dysfunction. We have been atomized and shamed into competitors on a leaderboard, rather than gathered into loving relationships and community. If shame is the feeling that something is so wrong with us that we are not worthy of love and belonging, then the antidote is not to play the shame game better. The antidote to shame is never more shame, it is always more love and belonging. End of.

1. I also had a heading each day with weather and sunrise/sunset information, which is the only part of this system I miss. This practice kept me in touch with the cycles of the seasons, and I have not yet found a new sticky ritual to take its place. My To-Do list also served as a sort of bookmark list of all the links I wanted to remember (but in truth rarely went back to look at), and now I just compile those links in a new Note each month (and still rarely go back to look at them….)

2. We are currently iterating this course, and will be offering NQYCP2 this spring! Register your interest to be notified when early bird discount tickets go on sale.

3. We still have just a few discounted “late bird” tickets available.