On noticing what you’ve accomplished!
introducing the anti-todo list
“One never notices what has been done; one can see only what remains to be done”
— Marie Curie
I work across time zones.
When I worked in a startup I would fly around the world to trade shows and conferences, deal with the jet lag and 12-24 hour days. Whenever I find that a particular meeting needs to be held outside what one might deem regular office hours. i remember those days and appreciate that, thanks to technology I can spend an hour in a zoom room with people from around the world, without having to go to the airport.
I’ve been in 5 such meeting over the past 48 hours.
And after the last one at 10am local time I was ready o call it a day. I read some substacks and lay down to take a nap, I picked up the book I was reading, Meditations for mortals and serendipitously it was about the productivity debt.
The productivity debt is this idea that we start each day feeling we owe the day a certain amount of productivity before our existence can reach an equilibrium. We need to be productive so that we can be allowed to even be.
We pay attention and drift to the insurmountable to do lists we have, never stopping to think about the things we’ve actually done. Like I was saying by 10 am today, I was practically done. But I also had a blank page in my Time Block Planner.
How could I possibly take a nap and call it quits for the day when I have a blank spread in my time block planner? Thankfully there was a solution.
I would fill it with a done list!
I’m sure you get the idea, you know when you have a todo list, and you add an item that you’ve already accomplished just so you get the satisfaction of crossing it off. You know what’s even more satisfying, skipping the to do list altogether and writing down all the things you’ve already accomplished, as you accomplish them or at the end of the day.
It’s a radical change in psychology. Instead of fretting about all the things that might never get done, you are focusing on the things you chose to actually do! A done list can hold exactly the number of things you can get done in a day, and it fills you with a sense of satisfaction, pride and joy rather than the feelings a told list give you.
So, I filled my empty planner with all the things I’ve accomplished by 10 am. Including the project I worked on from 12 to 2am. And since there was still space I added the things I accomplished yesterday, including delivering a major deadline for a book project.
On top of that I added some of the things that I learned that I could implement in the near future. And for a minute I allowed myself to enjoy the accomplishment, and knowing that in spite of having been so productive, I still had the time to take a nap, and spend the afternoon with my wife and play with my kid in the evening.
TEN MINUTE ARTIST PROMPT
Write a done list
Make a list of your recent accomplishments for the day, maybe the past week, or for the year so far. Enjoy and celebrate that you have done those things.
Keep this idea of writing a done list in your toolkit, find ways to incorporate it into your daily practice, and of course you can add drawings to it!
If you want to share your Done List, post it in notes and tag
Some of the things I did in the past 48 hours:
I had a great chat with
, and about what we’re learning on our substack journey and what we’re thinking about, they do say don’t they that your substack is the sum of the substack’s you hang out with, well if you like this, you’ll love what they do!I chat with the
about what makes collaboration work, you can get a recording of that conversation here (paid)I hosted an
with , and it was a powerful exercise in developing unique textures that you can apply to your future work. (The reviews have all been ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)And I’m continuing to plug along steadily on ArtQuest with
, If you enjoyed the recent Hero’s Journey Post, you’ll like ArtQuest!Read this though provoking post about how many notebooks you need and how you need to set them up.
I love the idea of done list, thanks for sharing. Recently I have been doing one line a day - I write down one good thing about the day and it's okay to skip a day or two!
Love this idea of a DONE list, and anti-to-do list, and already-did-it list!