June 22, 2022 • 10 mins
Do you have a cheerleader? Someone who’ll congratulate on the little wins, who’ll remind you that you’re doing well, encourage you to keep going? I hope so!
And even if you do… I’ll bet it’s still sometimes not quite enough. After all, we’re usually our own toughest critics, and even the completely legitimate kind words of the people closest to us can’t overpower that little voice in the back of our minds: the one that says “you’re not doing enough.”
How I Work listener Melissa knows this voice all too well, but after listening to author Oliver Burkeman’s advice to keep a “done list”, she realised the only voice that might be able to balance out the inner critic was her own inner cheerleader.
Connect with Oliver on Twitter
You can find the full interview here: Get your priorities straight with Oliver Burkeman
***
Pre-order Amantha's new book Time Wise at amantha,com
Connect with me on the socials:
If you’re looking for more tips to improve the way you work, I write a fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things I have discovered that help me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets I am loving. You can sign up for that at http://howiwork.co
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
CREDITS
Produced by Inventium
Host: Amantha Imber
Production Support from Deadset Studios
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
On the simplest level, it's just nice to remind yourself
that you sort of almost always, even when you feel
like a day didn't go very productively, you actually probably
did a whole lot of stuff. It's incredibly easy to
forget the sort of number of genuinely worthwhile things that
you did.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
If you're a knowledge worker, you have to be your
own boss, your own manager. Even if you're not self
employed and you have a real manager, the nature of
knowledge work means you need to spend a lot of
time working on complex, multi phase pieces of work independently,
and that requires a lot of self discipline and some
pretty involved self management. Unfortunately, we expect a lot from
(00:44):
ourselves as workers, but we're not very kind to ourselves
as bosses. We want top performance all the time, and
we don't take a moment to reward ourselves, to pat
ourselves on the back when we do succeed. This is
obviously detrimental to our happiness, but it's also ironically pretty
bad for our productivity. If we're constantly berating ourselves and
(01:07):
never pausing to acknowledge our achievements, we get stuck in
negative feedback loops. Your to do list will never actually end,
because you'll always need to add more items to it tomorrow.
And sorry, I don't have a solution for that. But
what you can do is compile a done list so
(01:28):
that the to do list doesn't expand forever in only
one direction. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an
organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him.
And this is how I work, a show about how
to help you do your best work. Welcome to your
(01:53):
Favorite Tips across ten bite size episodes. I'll be sharing
tips from some of the world's guest thinkers that you,
the listeners, have found the most useful. We're covering everything
from creating better to do lists to setting more effective
boundaries around your time, and you'll be hearing from people
like best selling author Sally Hepworth, Corona Cast host and
(02:15):
journalist Norman Swan, and Google's executive productivity advisor Laura May Martin.
Today's favorite tip comes from Melissa, and she writes, my
favorite tip is from your episode with Oliver Berkman about
reframing how we think about our to do lists. I
actually consciously did this yesterday when faced with my dreaded
(02:37):
to do list and gave myself a little high five
at the end of the day for completing three separate
documents and sending them out for stakeholder feedback. So here
is best selling author and Guardian columnist Oliver Berkman talking
about how he approaches his to do list.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah, that is an incredibly simple notion. That is just
the idea that in addition to all these lists that
we keep or systems that we have to tell us
and organize all the things we have not yet done,
the sort of terrible weight of the of the not
yet completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list
(03:15):
of that you add to of the things that you complete. Right,
keep keep keep a record of of what you do.
Some of the ways that people organize there there to
do is will naturally create these. Right if you're sort
of moving things among columns on a can band board
or something like that, you're going to naturally come up
with a list of completed items. But if you're the
(03:39):
just have a sort of regular to do list, like
keep one other list where you literally write something down
every time you've you've crossed it off one list, or
even if you wasn't on that list. You know, if
you do it, write it on the done list. I think,
you know, in the simplest level, it's just nice to
remind yourself that that you sort of almost always, even
when you feel like a day didn't go very productively,
(04:01):
you actually probably did a whole lot of stuff. It's
incredibly easy to forget the sort of number of genuinely
worthwhile things that you did. On a subtler level, I
think it helps challenge this notion that a lot of
people have, and that I certainly am still to some
extent afflicted by that you sort of start each morning
(04:22):
in a condition of what I called productivity debt. You
know that like you owe it to yourself or maybe
to your boss or something to to sort of pay
off this debt through being productive, and hopefully, on a
really good day you might get back up to like
zero balance. You might get yourself out of overdraft and
out of debt and back to zero, which is a
(04:45):
really kind of I mean, there are lots of reasons
for it, but it's a really unfortunate and self punishing
way to frame work, and it's tied into all these
kind of ideas that people have about their self worth
and about the idea that they're not really justifying their
existence on the planet, not really really have a right
to exist unless they unless they sort of pull off
(05:09):
a certain amount of tasks. Obviously, people are in jobs
where they do, in another sense, have to do a
certain amount of tasks to get paid. But in this
existential sense, you know, I think a lot of people have,
certainly me historically, have tied up their sense of sort
of basic adequacy as a human with how productive they're being.
(05:30):
And the great thing about a done list is it
sort of rewires this a bit, and it helps you
to think, well, how about you start the morning at
zero and everything that you do is extra, like it's
a deposit into your productivity bank account instead of just
paying off a debt. Why not think about it that way?
Why not think that you're absolutely enough as you are,
(05:51):
and then if you manage to do a whole lot
of cool things today, that's all extra and it's all great.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's so cool. I love that reframe because I've never
been able to consistently keep a done list, even though
I really like the advice and interesting. I've recently changed
my workflow around how I managed tasks, and I was
listening to you talk about your to do list strategy
(06:17):
and the long list and the short list, or I
think in the book you're referred to it as an
open list and a closed list. Yeah, which really resonated
with me, and I've recently someone put me onto this
software called Motion. Annoyingly, there are two calendar software is
called Motion and for anyone that is interested, it's Usemotion
(06:38):
dot iow dot com. And how it works is that
you have your combines your task list and I guess
this would be the well, I guess the closed list
with your calendar. So you're seeing both on the same screen,
and you enter your tasks on the left hand side,
and you assign an approximate time of how long they
(07:00):
would take to complete, and then you drag and drop
them into your calendar. So it's sort of automatically time
boxes for you in terms of that task then becomes
a meeting with yourself. And then when you finish the task,
like normally, what would happen if you were just doing
normal time boxing is time would pass and you would
have finished the task. But with this, you actually get
(07:21):
to tick it off and it stays in your calendar.
But it's kind of grade out, so like you get
to the end of the day and you feel that
sense of achievement or progress because everything you've completed is
still there, but it's ticked off, and you get to
tick it off as you go through your day, which also,
you know, it's just good in terms of giving you
(07:41):
that dopamine hit as you go throughout it, but it's
also good in terms of not over scheduling yourself because
you kind of like, you like, if you treat that
task list as the closed list, and then you make
sure that you have time to fit everything physically into
your calendar, then you kind of end up with this
(08:02):
perfectly balanced calendar. I find I personally love the idea
of a done list. It avoids that all too common
feeling of getting to the end of the day and
wondering what did I actually do today. On the days
where I do remember to write a done list, I
feel a really powerful sense of progress and like my
time was really well spent, much more so than when
(08:25):
I don't finish my day with writing a done list.
As the listener of how I work, you've hopefully picked
up a few tips on this show to help you
work better, but do you want more, and maybe in
a book form, because let's face it, books are the
most awesome thing on the planet. Well, now you can.
In my new book, time Wise, I uncover a wealth
(08:48):
of proven strategies that anyone can use to improve their productivity, work,
and lifestyle. Time Wise brings together all of the gems
that I've learned from conversations with the world's greatest thinkers,
including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Mia Friedman, and Turia Pitt
and many many others. Time Wise is launching on July five,
(09:09):
but you can preorder it now from Amantha dot com.
And if you pre order time Wise, I have a
couple of bonuses for you. First, you'll receive an ebook
that details my top twenty favorite apps and software for
being time wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading, cooking ideas
and more. You will also get a complimentary spot in
(09:30):
a webinar that I'm running on June twenty nine, where
I will be sharing the tactics from time Wise that
I use most often, and also some bonus ones that
are not in the book that I use and love.
Hop onto Amantha dot com to pre order now. How
I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from
Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Matt Nimba who
(09:53):
does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything
sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See
you next time. I'm
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
On the simplest level, it's just nice to remind yourself
that you sort of almost always, even when you feel
like a day didn't go very productively, you actually probably
did a whole lot of stuff. It's incredibly easy to
forget the sort of number of genuinely worthwhile things that
you did.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
If you're a knowledge worker, you have to be your
own boss, your own manager. Even if you're not self
employed and you have a real manager, the nature of
knowledge work means you need to spend a lot of
time working on complex, multi phase pieces of work independently,
and that requires a lot of self discipline and some
pretty involved self management. Unfortunately, we expect a lot from
(00:44):
ourselves as workers, but we're not very kind to ourselves
as bosses. We want top performance all the time, and
we don't take a moment to reward ourselves, to pat
ourselves on the back when we do succeed. This is
obviously detrimental to our happiness, but it's also ironically pretty
bad for our productivity. If we're constantly berating ourselves and
(01:07):
never pausing to acknowledge our achievements, we get stuck in
negative feedback loops. Your to do list will never actually end,
because you'll always need to add more items to it tomorrow.
And sorry, I don't have a solution for that. But
what you can do is compile a done list so
(01:28):
that the to do list doesn't expand forever in only
one direction. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an
organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him.
And this is how I work, a show about how
to help you do your best work. Welcome to your
(01:53):
Favorite Tips across ten bite size episodes. I'll be sharing
tips from some of the world's guest thinkers that you,
the listeners, have found the most useful. We're covering everything
from creating better to do lists to setting more effective
boundaries around your time, and you'll be hearing from people
like best selling author Sally Hepworth, Corona Cast host and
(02:15):
journalist Norman Swan, and Google's executive productivity advisor Laura May Martin.
Today's favorite tip comes from Melissa, and she writes, my
favorite tip is from your episode with Oliver Berkman about
reframing how we think about our to do lists. I
actually consciously did this yesterday when faced with my dreaded
(02:37):
to do list and gave myself a little high five
at the end of the day for completing three separate
documents and sending them out for stakeholder feedback. So here
is best selling author and Guardian columnist Oliver Berkman talking
about how he approaches his to do list.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah, that is an incredibly simple notion. That is just
the idea that in addition to all these lists that
we keep or systems that we have to tell us
and organize all the things we have not yet done,
the sort of terrible weight of the of the not
yet completed things. Cut yourself some slack, keep a list
(03:15):
of that you add to of the things that you complete. Right,
keep keep keep a record of of what you do.
Some of the ways that people organize there there to
do is will naturally create these. Right if you're sort
of moving things among columns on a can band board
or something like that, you're going to naturally come up
with a list of completed items. But if you're the
(03:39):
just have a sort of regular to do list, like
keep one other list where you literally write something down
every time you've you've crossed it off one list, or
even if you wasn't on that list. You know, if
you do it, write it on the done list. I think,
you know, in the simplest level, it's just nice to
remind yourself that that you sort of almost always, even
when you feel like a day didn't go very productively,
(04:01):
you actually probably did a whole lot of stuff. It's
incredibly easy to forget the sort of number of genuinely
worthwhile things that you did. On a subtler level, I
think it helps challenge this notion that a lot of
people have, and that I certainly am still to some
extent afflicted by that you sort of start each morning
(04:22):
in a condition of what I called productivity debt. You
know that like you owe it to yourself or maybe
to your boss or something to to sort of pay
off this debt through being productive, and hopefully, on a
really good day you might get back up to like
zero balance. You might get yourself out of overdraft and
out of debt and back to zero, which is a
(04:45):
really kind of I mean, there are lots of reasons
for it, but it's a really unfortunate and self punishing
way to frame work, and it's tied into all these
kind of ideas that people have about their self worth
and about the idea that they're not really justifying their
existence on the planet, not really really have a right
to exist unless they unless they sort of pull off
(05:09):
a certain amount of tasks. Obviously, people are in jobs
where they do, in another sense, have to do a
certain amount of tasks to get paid. But in this
existential sense, you know, I think a lot of people have,
certainly me historically, have tied up their sense of sort
of basic adequacy as a human with how productive they're being.
(05:30):
And the great thing about a done list is it
sort of rewires this a bit, and it helps you
to think, well, how about you start the morning at
zero and everything that you do is extra, like it's
a deposit into your productivity bank account instead of just
paying off a debt. Why not think about it that way?
Why not think that you're absolutely enough as you are,
(05:51):
and then if you manage to do a whole lot
of cool things today, that's all extra and it's all great.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's so cool. I love that reframe because I've never
been able to consistently keep a done list, even though
I really like the advice and interesting. I've recently changed
my workflow around how I managed tasks, and I was
listening to you talk about your to do list strategy
(06:17):
and the long list and the short list, or I
think in the book you're referred to it as an
open list and a closed list. Yeah, which really resonated
with me, and I've recently someone put me onto this
software called Motion. Annoyingly, there are two calendar software is
called Motion and for anyone that is interested, it's Usemotion
(06:38):
dot iow dot com. And how it works is that
you have your combines your task list and I guess
this would be the well, I guess the closed list
with your calendar. So you're seeing both on the same screen,
and you enter your tasks on the left hand side,
and you assign an approximate time of how long they
(07:00):
would take to complete, and then you drag and drop
them into your calendar. So it's sort of automatically time
boxes for you in terms of that task then becomes
a meeting with yourself. And then when you finish the task,
like normally, what would happen if you were just doing
normal time boxing is time would pass and you would
have finished the task. But with this, you actually get
(07:21):
to tick it off and it stays in your calendar.
But it's kind of grade out, so like you get
to the end of the day and you feel that
sense of achievement or progress because everything you've completed is
still there, but it's ticked off, and you get to
tick it off as you go through your day, which also,
you know, it's just good in terms of giving you
(07:41):
that dopamine hit as you go throughout it, but it's
also good in terms of not over scheduling yourself because
you kind of like, you like, if you treat that
task list as the closed list, and then you make
sure that you have time to fit everything physically into
your calendar, then you kind of end up with this
(08:02):
perfectly balanced calendar. I find I personally love the idea
of a done list. It avoids that all too common
feeling of getting to the end of the day and
wondering what did I actually do today. On the days
where I do remember to write a done list, I
feel a really powerful sense of progress and like my
time was really well spent, much more so than when
(08:25):
I don't finish my day with writing a done list.
As the listener of how I work, you've hopefully picked
up a few tips on this show to help you
work better, but do you want more, and maybe in
a book form, because let's face it, books are the
most awesome thing on the planet. Well, now you can.
In my new book, time Wise, I uncover a wealth
(08:48):
of proven strategies that anyone can use to improve their productivity, work,
and lifestyle. Time Wise brings together all of the gems
that I've learned from conversations with the world's greatest thinkers,
including Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Mia Friedman, and Turia Pitt
and many many others. Time Wise is launching on July five,
(09:09):
but you can preorder it now from Amantha dot com.
And if you pre order time Wise, I have a
couple of bonuses for you. First, you'll receive an ebook
that details my top twenty favorite apps and software for
being time wise with email, calendar, passwords, reading, cooking ideas
and more. You will also get a complimentary spot in
(09:30):
a webinar that I'm running on June twenty nine, where
I will be sharing the tactics from time Wise that
I use most often, and also some bonus ones that
are not in the book that I use and love.
Hop onto Amantha dot com to pre order now. How
I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from
Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Matt Nimba who
(09:53):
does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything
sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See
you next time. I'm
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