Help! My TODO list is exploding!

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt completely swamped with things to do, submerged in an ever-growing TODO list.

🖐️

If you haven’t, congratulations! Please reply-all and share your secret with all of us. 😉 

If you have, you are not alone. I lost count of how many times in my life I felt completely overwhelmed with things to do.

I also lost count of how many productivity systems I tried to wrangle my TODO list.

As a former productivity addict, feel free to ask me about any productivity system you’d like. Pomodoro technique, Kanban, Agile, Getting Things Done™, Calendar Blocking, Eisenhower matrix, 80/20, SMART goals, bullet journal, atomic habits, etc… I tried them all.

Unfortunately, none of these productivity systems really helped me deliver results.

It took me a while, and a lot of failures, to realize that productivity should not be confused with delivering results. Productivity is about cramming as much stuff as possible in a certain unit of time. But doing stuff and being busy all the time doesn’t mean we are actually delivering results.

Last week, a reader reached out to ask that I write something on Getting Sh*t Done (GSD). I was very happy about this request because delivering results (a.k.a. GSD) is the second pillar of captainship (the first one is, of course, helping others achieve their goals).

When it comes to delivering results, the most important thing is not productivity. It’s focus.

Even if we are tremendously inefficient (i.e. we have awful productivity), if we focus all our efforts on a single result or goal, chances are we’ll achieve it. Of course, being productive helps, but productivity is just a tactic. Focus is the strategy. We can’t win the GSD battle without the right strategy.

The secret to getting sh*t done is not productivity, it’s focus.

So the next time you are feeling overwhelmed with things to do, don’t try to find time for all of them. Stop. Focus. Throw away your TODO list and focus on delivering results, not being busy.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

P.P.S. As you might have noticed I made some design changes. I’m planning to experiment a bit with fonts and colors in the next few days. Let me know if you love it / hate it.