The Must-Do List Will Change Your Life

A simple organizational trick to stop overwhelm before it starts; plus a few words on protecting your "me time."

Happy Monday, my fearless fucklings! This week’s topic comes straight from the mail bag—aka the NFG Chat—where it was raised by not one, but two of my VIFs.

And that topic is…OVERWHELM.

Kind of a wide target, eh? As such, I’m going to start with one all-purpose tip for stopping it in its tracks, and then get a little more granular to address the specific issues of work-life balance that Sally and Bonnie were asking about in the chat.

Let’s do this!

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(And if you weren’t aware of the NFG Chat, well, here’s a handy link. It’s a perk for paid subscribers, and if you have topics you want me to address in future posts, this is the place to suggest them.)

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The Must-Do List will change your life

Folks, today I proudly present you with THE #1 tool I use to organize my time, increase focus and productivity, and—crucially—prevent overwhelm before it occurs.

I’ve been employing it in one form or another since college, but it was only when I wrote Get Your Shit Together that I gave it a formal name: The Must-Do Method.

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Get Your Shit Together with the Must-Do Method!

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Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Make a to-do list

Step 2: Prioritize the items on that list by urgency

Step 3: Move what MUST get done today to a “must-do” list

Step 4: Do that stuff and save the rest for tomorrow

Step 5: Repeat Steps 1-4

The reason the Must-Do Method works so well is because of its organizing principle: urgency.

Prioritizing strictly by deadline eliminates emotional sabotage in the form of “I don’t feel like doing that” or “But X would be easier than Y” or “I just like the person who asked for this more than I like the person who asked for that.”

(Oh, please. You know exactly what—and who—I’m talking about.)

It’s not that these aren’t valid ways to decide how you approach your to-do list, but in my experience, they are ripe for corruption. You wind up doing three non-urgent things just because they’re easier, and then running out of time for the thing you should have been doing. Oopsie.

Whereas the Must-Do Method reduces everything to brass tacks. You look dispassionately at your list, and you arrange it by due date and nothing more.

The result of separating what truly must get done first from all the other shit you have to do eventually is…A MUCH SHORTER LIST.

Which is automatically…LESS OVERWHELMING.

You love to see it.

And if your problem is procrastination—of all tasks—the MDM helps you there too. You’re literally supposed to find things to put off until tomorrow! Turning your to-do list into a must-do list is productive procrastination at its finest. Enjoy.

(And if adhering to this method shortens your list so much that you actually have a bunch of free time on your hands, sure, you can start on the next most-urgent round of tasks. It’s nice to get ahead! But you don’t have to, because you already did the stuff you MUST DO today. Have a nap. Or a cocktail. Or both.)

Back when I worked in an office, I would employ the Must-Do Method with a physical list on an old-fashioned notepad. On that pad, I kept my running to-do list—everything that popped up on any given day.

But at the end of each workday, I would scan that list and transfer only the most urgent tasks—the ones that needed to be accomplished first—to a fresh piece of paper.

This became my “must-do” list for the following day.

Then when I showed up at my desk the next morning, I automatically had a more manageable list to attack, which made it both easier to face the day and also much more likely that I would indeed finish everything I needed to do, having significantly narrowed my focus.

And I was able to occasionally slot in last-minute, suddenly-more-urgent-than-anything-else tasks precisely because I had more breathing room in my day to begin with.

(You could also do your to-do → must-do calculations in the morning on the day-of, but personally, it helps me sleep better knowing I have a plan in place the night before.)

These days, instead of a physical notepad, I use the AnyList app on my phone. (There is also a desktop version.) I keep a running to-do list that I add to as things come up or spring to mind.¹ And at night in bed, I rearrange my list (now by dragging and dropping instead of transferring to a new page) to put the most urgent tasks at the top.

Those are what I’ll tackle tomorrow—no ifs, ands, or but-I-don’t-feel-like-its!

All of this is to say, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, your epic to-do list may be the problem…but not necessarily for the reason you think it is. Try rearranging it as a must-do list and see how that works out for ya. I have a good feeling about it.

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Me time is a right, not a privilege

Now, let’s move on to Sally’s version of overwhelm, which she deemed in the chat “a constant problem, despite giving less fucks about things. Kids, work, home—what about me?!”