To-do Lists, Habits & Calendar
Rethinking Productivity: Why To-Do Lists, Habits, and Calendars Are Holding You Back
If we could sum up the current vision of productivity in 3 elements, they would be: to-do lists, habits, and calendars.
These are, in general, the biggest mistakes and misunderstandings in today's productivity. If you've ever wondered, "why doesn't this work?", well, here's where much of the problem lies.
But first, I want to propose a quick exercise to prove that the very notion of time is wrong, and you can easily see it.
Well, we think in images. Any doubt about that? Think about your computer, your wallpaper, the icons of the programs you use most... and bang bang bang, these images appear on the screen of your mind.
Now think about the year you are in, the next year, a period of 5 or 10 years. What comes to your mind? Nothing? A calendar? There’s the problem, if you don't have an image, you can't understand it.
If you don't have an image in your mind of time, you can't navigate it. That's why we have maps. Imagine navigating the world without maps. To navigate, you need to understand; to understand, you need an image. And when you don't have an image, you have confusion.
This confusion extends to several other important understandings related to work and productivity. The first and most important is time, and we will address that later. Now let's tackle the biggest symbol of personal productivity, the to-do list.
To-Do List
The most common view of the to-do list today is this: empty your mind, dump everything into a to-do list. Your brain is a "crap office," as David Allen would say, "Your brain wasn't made to store information; it was made to have ideas."
In a TED talk, David Allen, explaining the GTD method, talks about the importance of dumping everything into to-do lists, even comparing it to a karate move that might seem unnatural at first but will prove to be the most efficient form in the future, so much so that you will never go back to what you did before.
David Allen's view and the GTD method are responsible for much of the thinking in personal productivity today, and that’s not a bad thing, it's just limiting.
You can imagine that people hear so much about the importance of making to-do lists, of dumping their minds into lists, that it’s only natural for them to think that when they check off a task, it means they are being productive.
In other words, this view could be summed up in 2 parts: dump your mind into lists and check off as many tasks as you can. This is certainly the basis of how people think about productivity today.
There’s even the absurd idea, propagated by some productivity experts, that people add tasks to their to-do list just to have the pleasure of checking them off.
So let's start here: what happens when you check off a task on your to-do list? I mean in the real world, in reality, what actually happens when you check off a task on your to-do list?
Nothing. Nothing happens. To be even more objective, we could say that checking off a task on your to-do list is simply a signal you send to yourself that you don't need to worry about that anymore. Which actually just means you won't look at that task anymore, and if you need to look at it again, you’ll have to uncheck it or recreate it.
This is a good starting point. Any person, in general, has experienced how a real-world task actually behaves: you do it, think it's done, only to come back later and realize it can be improved. Some tweaks later (or many), you are satisfied and say it's really done. If you're a perfectionist, you sometimes keep making small tweaks until the last second, refining and polishing your work.
In other words, the to-do list is at least an unrealistic practice for most people. Of course, some may argue that if that were the case, a product would never reach the end of an assembly line, and here I need to remind you that we’re not talking about simple work, like a worker on an assembly line, we’re talking about much more complex work, like that of a knowledge worker.
So, do to-do lists not work? Far from it, a to-do list is a list, and lists work very well. What doesn't work well is the idea of checking off tasks and being productive because of it. That's what doesn't work that way.
And later you will understand what is missing from the to-do list to make it truly a tool that brings clarity and increases productivity. But let's move on to the next big obstacle people encounter in becoming more productive: habits.
Habits
Habits are certainly the most beautiful and pure thing in the current vision of productivity. Everyone talks about the importance of habits, and everyone has read "Atomic Habits" by James Clear.
First, Charles Duhigg wrote "The Power of Habit," bringing a clearer view of how habits work. After that, James Clear, in "Atomic Habits," emphasized the importance of habits and understanding the role of habits in an individual's identity. After all, I am the person who has this or that habit.
Of course, this is a simplistic view of the work of both authors, but if I don't delve into it, it's precisely because they have little relevance to productivity.
Despite authors like James Clear and Charles Duhigg bringing attention to the importance of habits, which is really important, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
I'll explain with an analogy: imagine that habits are books, and you are someone who likes good books.
You’ll want to have a book like "Romeo and Juliet," after all, it's a beautiful and timeless love story. Maybe you’re interested in "The Stranger" because although nothing much happens in the book, Camus writes very well. Maybe you like the Stoics; that's at least three more books: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. And Plato? How can you not read Plato?
After some time, let’s say you have ten books. These are really good books that you want to keep. Now I ask you, how long could you live carrying ten books?
Think about it, imagine you have to carry these ten books wherever you go. How long could you carry them? A week, 15 days? A month?
What’s the problem? Books are great, but you couldn’t carry them for the rest of your life. And do you know why? Because you're looking in the wrong place. If you want to have several books, you need to think first about a bookshelf.
If habits are books, the bookshelf is the routine.
Routine has gotten a bad connotation; people say they want to break the routine or that they don't like routine. Some even say they work better without routine.
The funniest thing is that we still use the expression "training routine", and athletes have always been here showing us the best way; we just weren't looking.
An athlete doesn't seek to implement ten habits; they enter a training routine. And many of them don't stay in the routine 100% of the time. Some prepare to peak at a certain time of year that coincides with the event they will participate in.
In other words, while you focus on habits and feel sad for not being able to maintain them, if you thought like an athlete, you would stay in a routine and understand that sometimes you can be in-season or off-season.
This alone is already a profound understanding that frees many people from a failed way of thinking.
But let’s move on to the next big villain of productivity: the calendar.
Calendar
How many people use calendars these days?
Today a calendar app probably has at least three views: day, week, and year. In other words, you can see just the day you are in, just the week you are in, or just the year you are in.
None of these views help you more than having an image of your time. Besides, there is still no tool today that really includes all the dimensions of time and presents this in the best way.
We will address the dimensions of time later, but first, I want to highlight the problem created by not understanding them.
What does a person usually do in a calendar app? They probably put blocks of work or appointments. In other words, they use a time management method called time blocking. By the way, this is a very old method; Benjamin Franklin already used it, but he used it differently, with characteristics that were lost in the digital form.
Here we can already point out the first mistake, which is: in general, people only look at the time blocks when they will work or have an appointment, forgetting the rest of the time. A day has 24 hours, and you can use them all.
Some say time is money; certainly not. Time is life, which means much more than money. But even if we used this concept and time were indeed money, it would still be a more appropriate view of this topic.
To illustrate the true extent of this problem, imagine that a person, despite earning a lot of money, can’t pay their bills. Anyone with simple logic would say, "you need to review your expenses." Now imagine this person saying, "this is what I spend on work." And the rest of the statement? "The rest I don’t know; I only have this part of the statement."
This is similar to what people do with time. Because they don't account for all the time they have, they don't use all the time they have.
I’m not talking about working more or working when you should be sleeping, quite the opposite. I believe in the importance of sleep, rest, and leisure in the routine. What I want to emphasize is that people don't have time for this because they don't account for all their time.
If people had a picture of time, a piece would be missing, the biggest piece. But that's okay, the person is using time blocking in their calendar, so what's the problem? The problem is that the person feels like they are in a rigid structure, feeling trapped, and feels like they need to finish one activity and start another exactly at the scheduled time, and if this doesn't happen, they feel they are not on track.
This creates a lot of stress in our relationship with time, which doesn't need to exist. Time is a broad, complex issue filled with factors that we need to address in parts. But let's conclude for now that the biggest problem with calendars is that people, when using them, don't consider all the time they have. Additionally, when they use the time blocking system, they feel restricted, and the fact that they are not sticking to the plan causes tremendous stress.
In this text, it becomes clear that the major principles used in productivity today are at least flawed. Don't worry, you will have plenty of time to explore a fundamentally new vision of productivity that will solve all these problems at once through a unique and innovative approach to productivity, and it will be as simple as the system that runs on your computer.
You don't think much about it; it just works. If I told you that there is a much superior system, much faster and more functional, and that you just need to install it in your life like you would install a new app on your computer, would you be interested?
Well, this system is 9POS, the first personal productivity system in history, which you can install in your life, and it will keep running like a Swiss clock, so you don't have to think or worry about anything anymore.
With 9POS, you will simply be free to achieve your biggest goals and live your best life.
Summary: The text challenges the current mainstream approach to productivity, which heavily relies on to-do lists, habits, and calendars. It argues that these methods are fundamentally flawed and contribute to misunderstandings about productivity. The author suggests that a deeper understanding of time and the use of more sophisticated systems could lead to better productivity outcomes. Specifically, the text introduces the idea of a new personal productivity system called 9POS, which promises to simplify productivity by functioning seamlessly, much like a well-designed app.
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Written by Vinícius P. Breves
👑 The New King of Productivity
🥷 Productivity Expert
⚫️ Founder of 9Pomodoros
✍️ Philosopher & Writer
