Rethink your to-do lists

All those to-do lists that never seem to get checked off: why do we do this to ourselves? Perhaps it is time to de-chore our lives?

As far as British business psychologist and author of Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much Tony Crabbe is concerned, to-do lists belong in the trash. He believes that smart planning doesn’t mean you can get everything done — we simply must make tough choices and this means we can’t do everything.

“The things that are really important to us, like spending time with our children, seeing our friends more often or finally writing that book never appear on our to-do lists,” he says in an interview with Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “If a list like this is the manual, by definition you are not doing what is most important to you.” How often do people say, ‘If I had more time, I would play tennis/learn Arabic/keep bees/buy a sailboat’? But it’s never going to happen if you take this approach. Crabbe’s advice? “Just do it.” Not later, but now.