List one task, do it, cross it out

I have a cleaning technique I call ant mode. A colony of ants can accomplish a lot. They can move immense amounts of materials, and create well organized groupings of things.

In ant mode, I pick up one thing, and then I put it in a place it belongs.

If I don't know where it belongs, I put it down with something else of the same type. I'm only ever picking up one thing, I'm only ever putting it down in one spot. I envision myself becoming a colony of ants.

It's very helpful when moving lots of things from one spot to another, and I pretend that I am one of multiple ants making the same trip back and forth. It's surprising how effective it is because there's no thought required. No second guessing. There's no wondering what to do next, it's just pick up something out of place and move where it belongs.

The best thing about ant mode, is that I can stop anytime, and I've accomplished something. Things are better than I found them.

My first job out of college way back in 1996, I was a hybrid computer operator for a backup site for a state lottery and a “programmer”. My manager told me when shit hits the fan and if we did have to take over from the primary site, I would be fielding calls left and right and people would be breathing down my neck - including my skip manager and people from the business side. We had a stupid high SLA and steep fines for being down.

He said ignore everyone and talk through the checklist of the step I was taking on the checklist. I had permission to tell everyone including him to give me some breathing room. In other words - do one thing at the time.

I’ve taken that to heart in my personal and professional life for the last 25+ years.

It’s especially helpful when shit hits the fan at a job and I need to prepare for my next move. I’ve developed a “it’s time to prepare for another job” checklist that I can activate at a moments notice.

I think this is why I love incident response.

"In an emergency, that whole tangle of self-absorption lifts, because "what needs to be done" is usually so obvious that nobody, not even my inner critic, could reasonably disagree. For a certain kind of person – and I'm definitely one of them – this total absence of ambivalence feels freeing, even disconcertingly elating, never mind the fact that what's unfolding around me is unquestionably bad."

I do something similar to this with my dead simple todo list. there is no TODO section a MAYBE section a DOING section and a DONE section, only one thing ever in the DOING section until it is crossed out, if you come across some rabbithole add it to TANGENT section and resist urge to do it, once you are done with your task pick another one from MAYBE. It sounds dumb because it is basically the same thing but TODO sections stress me out and bring about that foreboding feeling that you will never get it all done, and they always grow never shrink. A lot of times i’ll look at the MAYBE section the next day and some things just aren’t as important as I thought or somebody else did it. Like I said dumb and simple but thats why i like it.

Students (in some parts of the society), sometimes up to the age of 25, are put on rails and it is always obvious what needs to be done next.

Once in the "wild", most individuals are forced to make their own path. On top of that, minor tasks and chores pile up, leading to decision fatigue. Very few things are fulfilling. It's hard I guess. And that seems to be the topic in Oliver Burkeman's book 4000 weeks.

This is why I use Amazing Marvin. While far from perfect it has a deceptively simple feature: Give me a random task from this list.

It frees me from deciding between multiple equally important things to do. And it helps tremendously by forcing myself to then do this thing before moving on because I finally do those things that I have been procrastinating on.

Back when I last checked four or so years ago very few or no Todo tools had this feature.

An interesting corollary to this is how toxic latency is to productivity.

If in attempting to do "one thing" I get blocked for say, 2 minutes - what then? The answer is, I switch to something else. But now, I'm not doing "one thing". And now I get blocked on "thing two". So I'm doing 3 things. It's not long before I'm doing nothing at all, all my energy is in context switching, and I feel burned out, mentally exhausted and unproductive.

Hence why in everything I do, I try to kill latency in the process.

I guess I'm the only one to speak up for the silent majority:

I say: No!

Take your cognitive reductionism and shove it. Take your mechanical life hacks to your Mars colony, if you want to, but I'll stay on the green hills of Earth and live a natural, flowing life.

Advice like this is tossed out as if there is no cost to following it. The cost is self-alienation! This is a practice that encourages self-enslavement!

My super-ego is not the boss of me. Respect your procrastination, man. Procrastination is a message from your unconscious. Ignore it at your peril.

For me, I loved the idea of WIP in the agile system we adapted at one workplace:

Instead of one thing, we would allow up to two WIP projects per person, but there was a priority and a follow-up.

I still do this day to day with Trello.

I have a "Doing" column and what's on top is what I'm doing. Besides procrastination, I don't allow myself to do anything else until that's done. Sometimes I add a checklist inside that Trello card if it's a more complex task, then check off tasks one by one.

The second card can be worked on if absolutely necessary (like lining up a meeting or working on some background that's required a month beforehand).

I have one notebook that I carry around where I list tasks just in order to cross them out. There is something so viscerally satisfying in crossing out a task that just provides so much momentum to whatever I'm doing. There's just something beautiful about making the implicit explicit and then striking it through.

I use a variation of this I call now-and-next: write down a “now” task and “next” task, do the “now” task, switch “next” to “now”, write a new “next” task, and repeat.

My spouse saw me doing this and adopted the technique. When things get overwhelming, we say: “let’s now-and-next it”.

I did it, but I'm stuck in a loop:

̶L̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶s̶k̶

̶L̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶s̶k̶

̶L̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶s̶k̶

List one task

I've heard this similarly expressed as "Eating the Frog"[0] which is the singular version of "Warren Buffet's Two Lists"[1].

[0] https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/eat-the-frog

[1] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

If it works for you, great, but the reason I like to write down all of the tasks is so that I can let go of them in my mind. If I am only allowed to write down one task, I'm forced to memorise the rest of the tasks.

This rang true at a very deep level. Thanks for linking.

I just put this into similar words for the first time this week. It's the ambiguous priority that kills my productivity. It's debilitating and overwhelming. "Just do one thing. Any thing." Is something that I've been focusing on, even though I have had past feedback about prioritizing the wrong things, it's better than nothing.

Does anyone who recognizes himself in the persona of the article have any insights into handling long todo lists. I understand the idea if listing one task, but you inevitably have a list of dozens of stuff. So even if you make a seperate list with one to focus on, I seem to push down certain things for ever. Tending to pock and choose the easy or very urgent ones.

This works really well for me too. I built a task tracker tool (tasktxt.com) that has built-in timers for each task so you choose a task, then press "start" and now you feel more committed to doing that one particular task. It helps me focus on one task at a time.

I've found the advice to remember that you "only ever actually be doing one thing" not to be very broadly applicable. It's good advice for some situations like driving a car, but for things like writing code while responding to the occasional Slack message, it's not specific enough to constitute good advice.

Still, it's true, when understood properly, and maybe I just need to study it more to put it into practice.

This algorithm works well if you know what to do next. And how to do it. And when you have what you need to do it, or know when you’ll get it. And you’re sure it’s the right thing and you won’t second guess it as you go. And you didn’t forget something important like exercise or personal time. And your body/emotions are ready the same time you need them to be. Which is often, but not always

Perhaps the most enlightened period of my life was the two weeks after I first took psychedelics.

My biggest realization while under the influence was that my attention (and accompanying focus) was substantially similar to a laser beam: when directed to a single point, it could obliterate anything in its path. I also realized that I spent the majority of each day splitting this laser beam up into hundreds of smaller beams which had no ‘obliterating’ effect on the tasks they were meant to be ‘doing’.

For about two weeks afterwards, I had an incredibly Zen state of mind, where it became abundantly clear in every moment exactly what I should be doing. I would then do only that until it was done. The visual was always very clear — I was manifesting the superpower of fully directing the laser of my attention.

Somehow I lost that state of mind, but I am always seeking to reattain it. The ease with which I progressed through tasks during that period, and the amount that I accomplished was, and is, incomparable to any other period in my life.

Ever since, I’ve firmly believed that prioritization is the single biggest hurdle to getting things done. Effective prioritization is incredibly hard, and seems to require deep intuition. Prioritizing based on logical facts is near impossible, because you will necessarily spend more time deciding what to focus on than actually focusing on tasks. There is some trick that I believe incredibly productive people employ (whether consciously or not) that allows them to fully leverage their intuition for good prioritization.

When you really dig down into it, basically every business is simply a chain of priorities, and the businesses that prioritize better win in the long term. The same goes for scientific discoveries, and really any form of genius. The tricky part is innately understanding how to do prioritization without it taking up more time than the tasks you’re trying to prioritize, a gift, I was somehow temporarily granted by the mushroom.

> What's true of both the crisis situation and the daily situation is that at any given moment, you can only ever actually be doing one thing.

Sometimes you can organize your work such that while yes, technically you're just doing one activity, you're making progress on multiple todo entries simultaneously.

I think that's an important facet of effective "multi-tasking"; it has more to do with how you organize your work than being good at context switching. Sortof akin to enabling SIMD use by organizing the data such that it's applicable.

A practical example is I have this long-term excavation/grading project on my property that needs eventual doing. The dirt here is mostly sand, and I often mix stucco/concrete for projects. By deliberately sourcing the dirt from areas I need to excavate anyways, I'm making progress on the grading project when I'm making pavers or whatever needing sand.

I'm absolutely not a productivity system person but there are a few Getting Things Done suggestions that resonate with me (even if I don't always follow them).

If you can do something quickly and have the time, just do it.

(Also appreciate that certain things may lead to other things and that your 5-minute task may be opening up a can of worms. But if it's an expense report, probably just do it already.)

Break projects into actionable sub-tasks. Now, mind you, I may not be sure about one or more aspects of the project--and even if I need to do it at all--and find it's OK just to let it sit on a list even if that's somehow taking up brain space.

Separate calendar and to do list. (I do list rough to dos in my paper weekly calendar but don't list them on my electronic calendar unless they really have to happen on a particular day.)

I used to do this. Not anymore as I feel I can do it without having to write it down nowadays.

I even wrote a little app for it: https://todo.wout.space/

I made a tool to help me do exactly this! I even made a HN post about it, after making some HN comments about how well it is working for me.

(It's https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... in case anyone is interested).

I think lists also serve the purpose of getting your tasks out on paper. If I am working on 4 projects, I need to be constantly reminded of those tasks and need to break them down into smaller tasks. Getting Things Done is an effective method, but all of these things, including this method, require real effort. There is just no way around the fact that there is effort required.

Does the issue here lie in not focusing on a singular thing, or allowing yourself to get stressed about the things you're expected to do? If you're constantly worrying about your todo list then maybe you should look at why that is, instead.

- Is your list too long?

- Should you even make a list?

- Is the stress based on your own, possibly unhealthy, expectations.

  A common failure mode for companies like these is to talk a lot about how hard their problems are and never get anything at all done. Even a huge project starts with a first step. We look for founders that get that one done, and then the second, and ...
  
  Good founders get stuff done. Bad founders talk about why they aren't getting stuff done. This is true for web apps and nuclear reactors. 

- sama, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11315858

See also: Doing 3 Most Important Tasks at a time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555581

This reminds me of the Chaos programming model[0], the idea is you just work on whatever is (seemingly) the most important issue you encounter, without any higher level planning. Usually at the end of some work or integration there are tons of tiny issues that are best addressed like that. Whatever you see, that becomes the primary task now, no considerations. It raises the quality of the project overall.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_model

I think this is a half baked approach.

It sounds nice. Think of something worthwhile. Do it. Repeat. Awesome.

There’s two main issues I see 1) there’s no connectedness. You could spend your life swirling in different directions instead of focused in one. Ironic given this technique is supposed to help you focus. 2) there’s no consideration for timing. I might think of 5 worthwhile things now, but what if I choose the one that can be done anytime because it’s fun, vs the one that needs to be done by tomorrow? It seems quite easy for some important deadlines (that I’ve committed to) to slip!

> In an emergency, that whole tangle of self-absorption lifts, because "what needs to be done" is usually so obvious that nobody, not even my inner critic, could reasonably disagree. For a certain kind of person – and I'm definitely one of them – this total absence of ambivalence feels freeing, even disconcertingly elating, never mind the fact that what's unfolding around me is unquestionably bad.

As someone else who runs toward disasters, this really resonates.

> such as (to give a somewhat minor example) the day last year, deep in lockdown, when a shard of flying flowerpot ended up halfway through my partner's hand, sending her to hospital and upending our finely calibrated work and childcare plans for the week.

Author needs to realize this is a basic execution skill that most people have. Author is probably on the spectrum (like most of us here are).

The waterfall approach plus tunnel vision. Highly effective for getting things done in a team of one with no overarching goals.

Almost my philosophy! Except I do list multiple tasks at the start of the day, but the next day I do a complete reset and start over again (see https://can.do/about if you’re interested)

I would say it's less about listing one task, but focusing on doing the most important task at one point in time.

I loved the book four thousand weeks, refreshing reminder that we have limited time and attention and prioritization is the most important thing.

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Writing only one thing down would raise my fear of missing something out that needs to be done.

I like to have some kind of backlog of tasks to do, and clean that up regularly and start fresh with a daily list of tasks to do.

Is there a relation between the quality of content and the ratio of posts' points to the number of comments (beyond a certain threshold)?

This is what I do, except I sometimes list a few things because I know I need to do more than just one thing in the near future

If just one thing, it seems unnecessary to write it down.

Burkeman has a lovely series on Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app. It’s based on his book, which is also lovely, but isn’t just him reading it.

Free month here. No benefit to me.

https://dynamic.wakingup.com/shareOpenAccess/SC80D94AB

ok but if anyone sees your weird little list of normal activities that have been written down and crossed out they are going to suspect some kind of pathological loss of executive function, i'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's what they are going to actually assume