I’m sure you have been in the position of looking at a to-do list and deciding which item on it to do next. For example you might start the day with a list of tasks something like this
Check email
Tidy desk
Take action on challenging but extremely worthwhile project
Sharpen pencils
Check Facebook
How do you go about deciding which task to do first? You may use a variety of techniques, but they usually boil down to finding an answer to the question “What do I want to do next?”
I’m not going to say that the fate of the world depends on your answer to that question, but the fate of your future most certainly does.
If you’re not careful at the end of the day your five task to-do list will look like this:
Check email
Tidy desk
Take action on challenging but extremely worthwhile project
Sharpen pencils
Check Facebook
Sharpen more pencils
Check more email
Tidy In Tray
Check Facebook again
Buy more pencils to sharpen
Subscribe to more email lists
Re-arrange papers
Subscribe to Instagram and check that as well as Facebook
Now is a good time to ask yourself Benjamin P. Hardy’s question “If you repeated today every day for the next year, realistically, where would you end up?”
You would have some very sharp pencils and absolutely no progress on the challenging but extremely worthwhile project.
What’s causing the problem? Well, basically it’s that when you ask yourself “What do I want to do next?” you’re asking the wrong question. When you ask a question like that, the answer will usually be “Whatever’s easiest” [see Note]. The result of that is that at the end of the day you will look at the list and say “The one thing I wanted to do today was to get moving on the project and I was just too busy to get round to it.”
So you didn’t do the one thing you wanted to do. That happened to me the other day with my book challenge
What is the right question to ask?
It’s “What do I want to have done?” or more specifically “What do I want to have done today?”
This focuses your attention on the end result of your day and how your actions, or lack of them, will effect it. Life is made up of an accumulation of days.
Note:
When you’ve got good habits established whatever’s easiest changes, because you have made it so that it’s easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing.
And finally remember:
Short term question: What do I want to do?
Long term question: What do I want to have done?