A2 – Clean up your task list


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What

As time passes, some of your postponed tasks lose their justification. In this activity, you go through all postponed tasks and cancel those that are no longer justifiable.

While the main outcome of the activity is a clean list, a welcome by-product is that you might come up with interesting new ideas and create new tasks for them.

Why

It’s natural for some of the postponed tasks to lose their justification. It happens

That’s why you may end up with unjustifiable tasks in your list – but why should you have an activity like this to cancel all of them instead of canceling them whenever their time comes?

Tasks that have deadlines put pressure on you and limit your options. Tasks without deadlines are the opposite: the more such tasks you have in your list, the more options you have for investing your time, which gives you more freedom and potential for growth and pleasure.

A list with only 20 tasks represents a potentially sad situation: You don’t have many options and probably only react to urgent tasks that are referred to you at any given time. On the other hand, a list with more than 200 tasks shows a potentially ambitious and exciting life with many options to choose from.

This concept explains one of the benefits of cleaning up your list: If you have a list of 300 tasks but 250 of them have lost meaning without being cleaned up, you may be mistaken in thinking that you have enough options, whereas it’s not really true.

How

Create a recurring task for doing this activity and add your own tips on how to do it effectively inside the task.

It’s best to do this activity soon after revising your high-level goals (A1) because your adjustment of goals may have made some tasks irrelevant.

In general, you shouldn’t delete tasks, but rather mark them as canceled and set them apart. That way, you won’t lose the history of your ideas, which will be helpful in evaluating future ideas.

It’s helpful to add a note within each canceled task explaining why it was canceled, unless you believe that it’s really obvious why it was canceled and will still be obvious ten later. Such notes will help you when you come up with a similar idea in a few years but can’t remember why you canceled it the last time.

Common pitfalls

Normally, you should be able to clean up a list of up to 500 tasks in no more than two hours. If you need more time, you might be spending too much time on it. In that case, you can set a rule that if you can’t decide about a task in 20 seconds, you’ll keep it and move on to the next one. This is a general rule of thumb, though: You might realize that the clean-up process is a great source of inspiration for you and therefore it’s justifiable for you to spend as much time on it as it demands, which is also absolutely fine.

You may be too conservative in cleaning up your tasks, thinking that you may change your mind in the future. Don’t be worried, because you won’t delete those tasks: you’ll just mark them as canceled and set them apart. You can always go back later and review the canceled tasks and see whether you want to revive any of them.