I’m bigger than algorithms if I’m being direct
— Nas
To-do lists are appealing for various reasons.
One can order them to match the degree of urgency, importance, or impact. Completing a task tends to bring a sense of relief or achievement. So we continue to make to-do lists.
To meet certain targets, there are certain specific activities you’d need to do. These largely fall under the umbrella of to-do lists. They show up every day. Scorecards are reviewed after a quarter, a semester, a year, or several years. Each segment has its own to-do list.
Regardless, what doesn’t circulate about to-do lists is how they are mathematical improbabilities. That is partly why they are disappointing. You never execute everything on the list, not against your will, but because you’re not aware of the improbabilities working in the background.
Think of a target timeline. A project is supposed to come out on the 31st of December, before New Year’s Day, but it ends up being pushed. Why? Conjunctive events.
Conjunctive events are a series of events that contribute to the improbabilities underlying a to-do list. Say today, I want to wake up at 5 am, then do my workout, get to work before 7 am, answer all the emails, attend the meeting you have been planning for since the beginning of the year, organise the partnership meeting, attend your friend’s concert performance, do yoga, then sleep by 10 pm. How many activities? Nine.
Let’s assign each of them probabilities. We can be generous and claim that you will do each of these activities with a 95% probability. Since they are connected, we will use the function “and”. So you have to do 1 and 2 and 3 …all the way to 9. The probability of completing all of these activities will be 63%. That is 95% multiplied by 95% nine times (0.95⁹).
In complete honesty, it is difficult to have such a high probability for each of these activities. The snooze button already drops the probability by several percentage points. I have several alarms before waking up, and every morning, it is never the same. I have to battle the convincing philosopher who gives valid points that I should press the snooze button again.
We also see it in technology. Your phone will tell you that it will be fully charged in the next 3 minutes, but when you check after 3 minutes, it is yet to be fully charged. Why? Conjunctive events.
The result of these to-do lists is a sense of inadequacy. You know you could have done those activities, but for reasons you cannot explain, you didn’t. You end up feeling awful about yourself. The reason, in part, as I have just shown you, is probabilities.
I am never a fan of to-do lists. Sometimes, it’s not enough not to be a fan. You need an alternative.
I have an alternative…
And you know we ‘bout to run it.
To-do time
I call it to-do time because it’s a good replacement of one word for another. It’s also easier to remember how it works.
Our teachers back in school used it, but they didn’t call it to-do time. They called it a timetable. You can call it a time-table, but it wouldn’t have the same appeal as calling it to-do time. One needs to feel that it doesn’t necessarily take them back to school.
The timetable worked because every week, on Monday, from 8 to 10 am, we had math. It never changed. We had the kind of math teacher who would be livid if he found out that you were doing something else during his lesson. We loved him.
The timetable was so effective that teachers would almost always complete their curriculum in record time. Completing the curriculum in record time was in their respective scorecards. But the activities were not divided into a to-do list, but broken down by the finiteness of our time. School would start at 8 am and end at 4 pm. Teachers needed to find a way to fit everyone’s schedule within that timeframe.
The discipline to-do time introduced is unmatched. Nearly every single day, I know that between 5 pm and 7 pm, I should be writing. Because of conjunctive events, it might not always be the case. Sometimes I will start writing at 8 pm, like today. I didn’t know I had forced it into a habit until my lady had stayed with me for a while. One evening, she commented on how easy it was to tell my routine. To-do time can make it that easy to narrow down one’s priorities. Which brings me to the core power of to-do time as a tool.
We have so many things to do. Our world is moving fast. The internet is covered with slop from one corner to the next. Everyone is competing for your time and attention. And briefly, allow me to wax lyrical about the insensitivity of AI usage because it is tied to understanding why you need to create your to-do time.
So, someone somewhere doesn’t care what AI has produced. Only that the output came from them. Whoever consumes it will have lost their time consuming a product that was not evaluated. It was created the moment someone keyed in the prompt, copied and pasted, then shared it with the world.
Our online time is consumed time. It will never come back. Multibillionaires are keen on taking every bit of your time. When a company claims that its biggest competitor is sleep, it means that your goals come secondary to theirs. With a to-do list, you don’t wield the right tools to fight these individuals and companies effectively. A mighty powerful one is to-do time. If I’m being direct, in the words of Nas, it is bigger than algorithms.
This tool, I suggest, allows you to narrow down to your priority activities. It forces you to weed out the minutiae, the frivolous, the unnecessary, to build what you value. That is, what you give two poops about. You know you value it when you do it every day or at least a couple of days every week.
Narrowing down your priority lists helps to make a to-do time schedule. For something to make the cut to your priority list, it means it’s big. Its impact on you and those you value is astronomical. You will not be able to achieve it in a day. But every day, you lay the bricks one by one. Over time, you build a fortress.
Even better, once you establish this structure, all the online tricks to steal your time and attention hardly make a dent. Since they throw at us these tricks every time in imperceptible ways, we have to act with as much relentless effort. As Nas reiterates, we should do it till our last breath.
Focus is a rare quality. Remember, every platform owner is struggling for your time and attention. Herbert Simon added, “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
As attention gets scarce, it gains value. You’d better pay attention to the goals that you value. Anyone who devalues your priorities should come secondary.
To-do time schemas work for you. Besides helping you narrow down your essentials, it rewards you with time, every day, as you build towards your target. Basically, a gift that keeps on giving.
Going back to school, a teacher’s target may be to complete the syllabus in record time. They may or may not have a specific timeline. They will therefore argue for several lessons in the timetable. Every day, a single brick is laid. Before the year ends, they achieve their goals.
Counterintuitively, they begin by setting goals or targets, but from to-do times (that is, timetables), they end up building systems. While trying to rise to the level of their goals, they fall to the level of their systems. As these systems prove robust, it becomes difficult for teachers to fail to achieve their goals.
In contrast, to-do lists do not have this in mind. They can be as vastly distant from your long-term goals. They don’t narrow down the decision architecture to your prized goals. Worse, they don’t create robust systems. To-do time does.
It also means that a to-do list can mutate into to-do time if some activities appear more regularly than others. But how many times will you wait for the mutations to happen before this becomes noticeable?
Furthermore, our brains easily conform to a style rather than question the style. You are more likely to stick to to-do lists rather than question them. So it may not be wise to think that eventually, you will get a to-do time from a to-do list. You are better off switching immediately to to-do times rather than sticking with to-do lists in the hope that they will mutate to a tool that is wholly for you.
The stinking rich usually advocate for sticking with the boring. It’s easy for a to-do time schedule to become boring. It could also mean that you will be on your way to becoming wealthy. And, as your wealth bracket changes, your priorities may change. Provided you adjust your to-do times, you’ll be fine. As you become more powerful by focusing your time and energy, you can confidently sing along to Nas’s line:
How can they stop me
It also creates a checklist that is incorporated into your daily activities. As Atul Gawande has preached in his book, checklists are powerful tools that tame complexities to your desire. Getting a to-do time is having a robust tool that gives you control. A to-do list gives you the false impression that you are in control. It also downplays the relevance of long-term goals by letting you focus all your energy on today’s activities, which might be completely divorced from tomorrow’s or yesterday’s. To-do time aligns your long-term goals with daily activities. To-do time is functionally a checklist. Or in corporate parlance, strategy alignment.
A consistent tool, such as the checklist that a to-do time embodies, makes it easy to track progress and notice changes. A to-do list lacks this quality. One can then make adjustments from a solid foundation rather than make new to-do lists every other time. The energy and time of making new ones is completely salvaged since you have a checklist to use. By the time one is adjusting their to-do time, they have solid evidence and good reason to change it. What more would anyone want besides moving forward with clarity?
What I’m trying to say is…
I am not a fan of to-do lists. Maybe it has been helpful to you. But I suggest you consider this one alternative option and see how it can apply to your goals. I have tried to share its positives and the gaps it reveals from a to-do list.
As far as complexity goes, I have yet to encounter a tool that is as effective at controlling it as a checklist. To-do time embodies the spirit of a checklist. To-do lists feign this ability.
I’d argue that you drop it and pick this alternative option.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube