Your Never-Ending To-Do List

No matter how hard you try, you're not going to tick off every single thing you want to get done.

There’s an amazing truth that you realise one day that kinda changes everything, and it’s this: you’re never going to get to the bottom of your to-do list.

No matter how hard you try, no matter how many hours you sacrifice, no matter how much you really want it to happen, one of the cardinal rules of life is that you will not be able to tick everything off your list.

Of course, you might get through the most important ones, or whittle them down, but the minute that you do it will simply be replaced with just one more thing that you remember you now need to get done. To-do lists are renewable resources that just keep going, ironically at roughly the same pace that you slog your way through them.

But you know what? As soon as your realise that it’s a living thing that’s not intended to be completed, you can view it in a whole new light. It’s actually freeing to realise that the point of a to-do list is to get things out of your head and onto a piece of paper, or into an electronic list, so that you can then start prioritising them.

Not every item on there is equal; a list is not about the order that you write it down, it’s about the priority you give to get the most important things done first. To help with this, there’s a pretty nifty way of thinking that I use frequently to help me get sh!t done.

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One Useful Thing for June 2024: The Eisenhower Matrix

Dwight Eisenhower was a very busy man. The 34th President of the United States, sandwiched between Harry Truman and JFK, had a saying that he loved to repeat. “I have two kinds of problems,” he’d say, “the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

It’s one of the quotes you need to re-read again slowly to let it really sink in, and it has inspired a simple tool that’s often used in time management processes named in honour of him and this quote.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a way of categorising all of the potential things you could be spending your time on, and putting them into one of four boxes. Each of the boxes represents how urgent or important each task is:

This is what the Matrix looks like:

Here’s how to use this tool:

1. Draw up the Eisenhower Matrix with four boxes, each one representing a scale from Urgent to Not Urgent, and Important to Not Important.

2. Write out all of the things currently on your to-do list, noting that this is a never-ending list of course!

3. Classify each of your tasks into one of the boxes on the Matrix. Is it urgent or not urgent? Is it important or not?

4. Once you have written out each of your tasks, you should have a few items in each quadrant, and you can now use the matrix to help you decide what to do with each task. The first box to tackle is the top left-hand quadrant that has all of the important and urgent tasks. You should do these items immediately and personally.

5. The next box to tackle is the top right-hand box, ie. those that are important but not urgent. You should decide a date that these should be completed personally so you can know when they will shift from being non-urgent into the urgent box.

6. The third box to tackle is the unimportant but urgent tasks. The best way to approach these is to delegate them to other people so they can be completed as quickly as possible.

7. The final box is the not important and not urgent tasks. Most of these are time wasters and should most likely be just deleted.

To help give you a visual reminder of the best way to tackle each of the tasks once you’ve categorised it, this is what the Eisenhower Matrix looks like in full effect:

If you’re got an overflowing to-do list that you can never seem to get to the bottom of, that’s ok. You need to get through every single task, you just need to start with the most important - and urgent - ones first. Then you can work through the matrix doing, deciding, delegating and deleting from there.

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I’m currently in Mallorca, where the Summer heat has really started to come on. It’s quite lovely, until one day it’s not. Next week we’re heading to the Alps for a few weeks, to work from there and hike up and down large mountains. We’re back in a campervan, which is one of my favourite things in the world to do. I love the freedom, and simplicity, that comes with it.

I’m going to be spending the next few months putting the finishing touches on the international edition of my book Work Backwards. In very exciting news, the book will be published in the UK and USA by Wiley in October, so we’re currently making sure all of the references make sense to audiences all around the world. I can’t wait for more people to discover this way of approaching work and life.

I’ve also just started writing a new weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Each week I’ll tackle a new topic around how we work and our careers, like this recent story on who’s going to win the return-to-office tug of war? I aim to write about the work topics everyone is thinking about but hasn’t yet found the right way of talking about it yet. It’s going to be fun, so strap in with me.

Until next month,

Tim