How to Make a To-Do List That Doesn't Make You Hate Yourself By 4 PM
Insights into avoiding the cycle of doing too much, crashing out, & repeating
I both love and hate these types of articles on productivity and lifestyle, and yet I also still consume them to this day. I don’t know that I will ever get over the question of, “How do we do mundane life better, deeper, more meaningfully, with more ease, etc.” Since I am in training in psychiatry, it’s probably a good thing that this well runs so deep. On this Friday, before the weekend, I present to you five considerations on making a to-do list that doesn’t make you want to rip your hair out.
My credentials on this have less to do with being a therapist, and more to do with getting through undergrad, medical school, and residency while constantly trying to do creative projects alongside it. We don’t all have the same access nor hours in a day, so I present you principles rather than rigid rules because I think the principles can help with particulars.
I give you this on a Friday, but maybe you wait to think about it until Sunday. When you have the Sunday afternoon scaries, sometimes the best thing you can do is what we call Opposite Action in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). When you’re feeling anxious and a bit frozen on Sunday, sometimes doing one small thing (hello, Avoidance Diaries) can open you up a bit more. Opposite action is when you first validate an emotion you are having, then notice what it drives you to do, and then you do the opposite of the direction that emotion is driving you towards. When used gently, it can be helpful when we notice a way of dealing with emotions or problems over time that is not serving us. If you’d like to learn more about this, I find this video by DBTKiki really helpful.
Principle One: What would a kind coach do?
I once had someone reflect to me when I was in medical school that my inner monologue and expectations sounded like a brutal sort of coach. We had both been runners in high school, and this reflection made me think about good and bad coaches I’d had.
A good coach helps you find your gifts and your growing edge. In some ways, they are like a good gardener: they understand time and slow change is the norm, that there are seasons to things, and that one can cause damage pushing too hard. A good coach in high school would ask how to get someone from an 8 minute mile to a 7 minute mile, not push them to suddenly run a 5 minute mile. Similarly, they wouldn’t just leave someone already running a 6 minute mile to stagnate, but would strengthen and encourage them to get faster, try new strategies, and expand their skills. Being unkind is bad coaching, but being unbelieving in someone’s ability to grow would also make a lackluster teacher. A bad coach would have unrealistic expectations and then moralize about an athlete’s inability to complete the plan as their personal failing.
If you’d like an example of good coaching, I think that Coach Bennett of Nike Run Club is a great example of what balanced kindness and encouragement look like.
Does your to-do list sound more like the Good Coach or the Bad Coach?
Principle Two: To quote Mr. Rogers, “I like you just the way you are.”
Imagine this: it’s the first warm Saturday morning of spring, you just accidentally watched an hour of #Skinnitok (it happens), and the summer your life and productivity are going to be Different. You spend the afternoon drafting up your ideal workout plan, budgeting set up, creative hobby, and delete all the apps that are going to distract you from your New You. You go to sleep ready to wake up Sunday excited to start your new life or 75Hard (or, if you’re with me, 75GROW). Gently in the background, you fall asleep to the tune of Rapunzel’s “When Will My Life Begin?” combined with an Elle Woods montage.
On Tuesday, you hide your journal under your bed, you cancel the subscription service to some workout platform you promised you would do daily, and you order specifically the Uber Eats that is both unreasonably expensive and really does make your stomach hurt the next day. You unblock your ex, or stalk their page. You feel demotivated and like a fool for once again thinking you were capable of change.
One of the things that enrages me so much about the hyper-productivity and optimization wellness world is that its insistence on perfection and transformation (QUICKLY, I should add) actually prevents many people from being able to witness the very human and earthly ability to grow and change. Because it insists on a cancerous and sudden type of growth, it leads people into a cycle of rigidity and then crashing out, and then tells them to personalize it as them in particular being “uniquely fucked up” (to quote my first ever subscription on Substack, Heather Havrilesky). This creates an incredible obstacle to a view of change that asks for months to years for slow, sustainable, and true growth. It keeps you stuck in a disempowered cycle, which just so happens to also be distracting and profitable for those who can sell you a course or a product to fix it.
No matter where you are, no matter how Dire or Truly Bad or Genuinely Fucked Up the place you start from is, we try to start from a place of realizing that as a person, we have value in the world. We have some goodness, and probably a lot of goodness that works already. We are not a project to be fixed, in the same way you wouldn’t look at a 30 year old tree working on growing a new branch and say, “Only that branch is good. The rest of the tree is ugly and bad and should be chopped down.”
Principle Three: View it as a longitudinal study, with yourself as the scientist.
When it comes to making a to-do list each day, if you can take the perspective of finding what works over time, each day will feel less daunting. Assume that what you’re doing now is not working, and set the first task as simply increasing awareness as to how, why, and in what ways it isn’t working.
Concretely, this would look like making a to do list at the start of your day. Instead of viewing it as binding, view it as a prediction or a hypothesis for what is possible for you today (and remind yourself of the kind coach before you write it). Then, as you go through your day, make a second list or a “Done” list. I find it the most helpful to fill in hour by hour of the work day for a couple reasons. One, it helps you actually see where time is going, where you waste time, or where you might be getting tired or hungry. Two, it helps you learn how long tasks actually take you.
Before you try to overhaul a habit or skill, actually monitoring it first can be helpful in and of itself, but it is also the bare minimum to figure out your first hypothesis in trying to change your behavior. If you can have this neutral, slowed down approach, you much less likely to let a fantasy ideal become something you compare yourself against. It also is much more likely to be more you-centered and therefore more sustainable.
Principle Four: Write your list for the most mediocre version of you.
Related to the above principle of learning how much time things actually take is learning what your average capability is day to day, and planning for that version of you, rather than the version of you that can come out a few times a year.
But I don’t WANT to be that version of myself, that’s why I’m reading this post in the first place! I know, I know, but there is a paradox here. One is that if you plan for ideal you all the time, you will fail most days or you will get so rigid and stressed that it will just be flat out unenjoyable and therefore not something sustainable. If you plan for ideal you, every day is an exercise in lowering your self-esteem and view of your self-agency, because every day you are hyperaware of how you fall short.
The paradox in planning for mediocre you is that as you practice doing things that are a little difficult, leaning into work or a chore you’ve been avoiding, or building a healthy habit over time, you are able to see your capacity to change and to sustain that change. You also just naturally get better at doing these day-to-day tasks, and that builds you skill in doing so, your energy, and your ability to plan and enact said plan. This builds up both how you feel about yourself and your skill in managing your time and actions, which helps you move more towards what you value.
I know—I hate a paradox too, but alas, it seems to be what the world is made of.
Principle Five: Consider how much you like spontaneity.
One concept I’ve found useful for my own brain is learning how much it likes spontaneity and how much easier work and chores are when I have a flexible framework. For me, it means not being rigid about which thing has to happen first, and allowing choice where I can.
The exercise in writing a to-do list and then seeing what actually happens helps us figure this out. Does it seem like the thing you scheduled yourself to do at 1 pm or right after work almost never happens? Is it because you’re hungry, or because you’re tired from interacting and focusing all day, and need something different there—like rest, play, connection, or ever doing a physical task instead of a mental one?
Wherever you can make it so that your in-the-moment desire can be used to do something you want to be doing, the less it will feel like work or like needing to overcome. This is part of starting and sustaining a different type of habit.
In terms of applying this after you learn from your experiment, we have a few options. One thing I do on TikTok for chores is the Avoidance Diaries, and in these, I set a time, pour a fun little mocktail, and let myself pick from a number of things to clean up or take care of. I don’t schedule which ones will be first, because the ability to impulsively choose one thing or another is more fun, and it makes it so enough gets done in having a tidier, calmer home, that I don’t need to be rigid with it.
Another way to add flexibility is to change your format. On some days, a Ta-Da list can be a better option than a To-Do list, especially if they aren’t urgent tasks. Similar to the Avoidance Diaries, this could be just saying I’m going to work on things for a couple hours, and then picking from the list what sounds the least annoying. The Ta-Da list lets you have credit for things that come up in between tasks, or that you’re reminded of. This can, at the end of the day, help combat the constant feeling that you’re never doing enough. Related to this, please have a closing time at the end of the day where you move things that didn’t get done to the next day, and notice all the work or chores you did do. Take a moment to be kind to yourself, even if the only level of self-encouragement you can tolerate is re-reading everything you did (No, you do not need to speak to yourself in the mirror if you don’t want to…I don’t want to).
Above all else, treat yourself like part of Nature, and like all nature, our pace of growth is slow and wavy.
If you let small be something, each day can be a bit better and elicit a lot less self-punishing talk. Over time, this will make you feel more capable, and it may even get you a cleaner home or inbox. When the world is as it currently is, even having one small thing we can control can be a big source of comfort and strength.
Take care, and as always, thanks for your attention.
xx,
Margaret of Bad Art Every Day