Ness Labs

Key takeaways from Not-to-do list: a conscious way to break bad habits

The good old to-do list is a staple of most productivity systems, used to keep track of tasks and manage your focus throughout the day. While to-do lists are powerful, a complementary method can… Open at source

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Do not eat lunch at your desk. Taking breaks is essential for your mental and physical health.

Do not abuse time blocking. While blocking time is a great way to regain control over your schedule, being overzealous can prevent you from experiencing serendipitous opportunities and spontaneous creativity.

Do not try to reply to every single email.

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medium.com
Stop thinking about productivity, and start thinking about focus.medium.com
~12 min read · 2020-09-11 · All the articles you’ve been reading are tricking you.
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Pay attention to when you are confident in your judgment, and when you are insecure.
Often when we talk about focus we are actually talking about the results of focus, not the experience itself.
When we focus on something, whether it’s a conversation with a loved one, a passion project, or a key objective at work, we are giving it the entirety of our attention. That means trusting in and whole-heartedly giving ourselves over to one thing — which necessarily means ‘de-prioritizing’ other things.
WIRED
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’tWIRED
2 min read · Jul 27th · You want to be productive. Software wants to help. But even with a glut of tools claiming to make us all into taskmasters, we almost never master our tasks.
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Chen and Guzman became gradually chagrined. After five years of working on IDoneThis, they sold the company to a private equity firm. “We felt like we’d exhausted what we knew to do,” Guzman says. IDoneThis isn’t gone; you can still use it today. But its creators couldn’t shake the feeling that building the perfect system to effectively manage tasks was itself a task they couldn’t accomplish.
“We call it snowballing,” says Amir Salihefendić, who founded the app Todoist in 2007; it currently has 30 million users. “They keep postponing stuff. And then suddenly you have a hundred tasks that you need to do.” Weeks or months later, your Todoist app is a teetering ziggurat of tasks, too painful even to behold. Omer Perchik, the creator of another app—Any.do—calls this problem “the List of Shame.”
Whatever the cause, today this is known as the Zeigarnik effect, and psychologists who study task management say it’s part of why so many of us feel perpetually frazzled by the challenge of organizing work and life.
Lifehack
15 Strategies for an Effective To-Do ListLifehack
10 min read · 2020-07-05 · To do lists are a great productivity tool for many of us, but they can be tricky. Here are some strategies to make an effective to do list.
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1. Break the List Into Two Part
2. Put a Limit on Items
3. Use Checklists for Complex Tasks
Fast Company
How to transform your to-do list into a productivity power toolFast Company
3 min read · 2020-03-09 · It will likely require shifting your mindset in a few key ways.
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Neustadt says we really only have the bandwidth to have two or three priorities. “Otherwise we’re not living authentically, and are scattered and unfulfilled, filling time with stuff that doesn’t matter to us.”
Once you know your priorities, everything on your to-do list should serve them.
Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, consider yourself the CEO of your day. Look at your to-do list and assign every task a metric or value, such as a dollar-per-hour amount that you might have to pay someone else to do it
blog.doist.com
The Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity Methodsblog.doist.com
20+ min read · 2020-09-17 · Productivity methods to organize your tasks, manage your time, maintain your focus, and achieve your goals. Find the one that fits you best.
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Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on
phrase from Pirates of the Caribbean, productivity methods are more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules
a brief overview of the most popular and useful productivity methods, how each works, and what kind of person will find each useful.
Fast Company
To better track your productivity, focus on your bandwidthFast Company
4 min read · 2020-11-04 · If you feel like your time and energy are slowly slipping away from you, you may be overloading on commitments.
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wedo.com
WeDo :: #1 Todo List Appwedo.com
From 2016 · The best way for you and the people in your life to get things done.
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Paul Graham
The Top of My Todo ListPaul Graham
From 2013
nature
Tips from neuroscience to keep you focused on hard tasksnature
5 min read · Mar 16th · Understanding cognitive control can help your working life, says David Badre.
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To solve hard problems, the brain needs ready access to the information, plans, procedures and knowledge it will be using. Cognitive scientists refer to this collective task knowledge as a task set.
When we decide to perform a task, our brains do a cost–benefit analysis on the fly, weighing the value of the outcome against the projected mental investment required to be successful. As a result, we often avoid hard tasks in favour of smaller, easier tasks, particularly if we aren’t making immediate progress.
returning to a hard task in this way comes with a ‘restart’ cost

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