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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

From thought to list, fast

When your struc­ture is in place, with one clear place (ide­al­ly just one) to note all your tasks, it becomes easy to add new to-dos as they come to mind. Per­son­al­ly, I have an extreme­ly short path from the thought that I should do some­thing to it end­ing up on my to-do list.

This makes the list long. It includes every­thing I’ve come up with over time that should, must, or could be done. You may not come close to fin­ish­ing every­thing and may feel bur­dened by it all, espe­cial­ly right now.

A bro­ken ship

My father built wood­en ship mod­els. I lost him very ear­ly, and when my broth­er and I cleaned out our child­hood home, I nat­u­ral­ly kept the remain­ing mod­els. The Dan­ish ship ​“Lil­la Dan” was a bit worn. Sev­er­al lines had snapped and were hang­ing loose. I thought, ​“I have to fix that,” and added it to the slight­ly heav­ier list of things that need to be tak­en care of. Phew.

Then I stopped myself. It dawned on me that the mod­el doesn’t need to be repaired right now, or even any­time soon. Fix­ing a wood­en mod­el isn’t some­thing I need to focus on at this stage in life. It’ll be per­fect to do lat­er, when I’m old­er and less mobile, if I even want to then. Lil­la Dan isn’t going anywhere.

Now I keep the bro­ken mod­el in the win­dow nook in front of my desk at work. It’s a con­stant reminder that just because some­thing can be done, it often doesn’t have to be done right now.

Do this

If things are hec­tic and your work­load feels heavy,

1. Skim through your to-do list and look for tasks that don’t absolute­ly have to be done now (even if you could do them now, if only you had time).
2. If they have a dead­line that’s more a hope than a firm com­mit­ment, remove it and let the task remain ​“float­ing.”
3. If you real­ize the tasks are option­al enough that it’s not even cer­tain they need to be done at all, move them to a ​“Some­day” list or tag them ​“Some­day, if you want” to keep them with­in the same project or theme.
4. Find tasks marked as ​“ASAP” that you can instead move to a more pre­cise ​“lat­er”, in three months, for exam­ple, then assign either a firm due date or a fuzzy dead­line like ​“before year-end” (or ​“in old age, fix Lil­la Dan”).

A relief in a heavy time

When you decide what doesn’t have to be done now, your unnec­es­sar­i­ly heavy work­load becomes lighter. You have less hang­ing over you, and more often than before, you can feel caught up and done for now. Dur­ing an intense peri­od like this, that’s a relief.

What about you?

What tricks do you use to ease your work­load when it’s too much? Write to me and share. Nat­u­ral­ly, this is a struc­tur­al aspect that affects most of the peo­ple I help, so I’d love to hear what works for you.

(Anoth­er tip when you are up to your neck in work and the to-do list is long, is to do short tasks first!)