Do you every have a great idea that you’d love to implement? Do you ever get inspired to do something? Anything? Clean your desk, write a blog post, organize your files? And then, instead of just doing it, you add it to your “todo” list and watch it clutter up your list of things that you really need to do. Once it makes it to the todo list, it’s as good as dead.
People live for little accomplishments and they love to reward themselves for a job well done. For some reason, these people feel that adding a task to a “todo” list is an accomplishment in and of itself. News Flash: It’s not!
Inspiration has an expiry date and it’s usually less than the milk in your fridge. If you don’t act on inspiration, your inspired idea will never get done. Go ahead and change your reward system from rewarding adding items to your “todo” list, to actually doing the items. Trust me, you’ll be much happier and much better off. When a “todo” list gets more than a few items on it, the lister becomes considerably less productive the more the list grows.
Do yourself a huge favor and act on inspiration and when using a “todo” list, only keep the most important 5 items on there at a time.
*I wrote that above title on my todo list a few minutes ago, slapped myself in the head and then finished the article.