I spent four hours yesterday looking at a list of things I wasn’t going to do. It was 3 PM on a Tuesday, raining in Seattle, and I had “Update CRM” staring at me from my screen. I’ve had that task on my list since April 2022. It is now nearly two years later. That’s not a task; it’s a ghost haunting my laptop.
I work in operations for a small logistics firm. It’s fine, but it’s the kind of job where the work never actually ends. There is always another spreadsheet, another vendor to call, another process to “optimize.” For years, I believed the lie that the more things I wrote down, the more I’d get done. I was a high-functioning liar. I’d end every day with 15 things checked off and 20 things added, feeling like a failure despite working ten hours straight. It’s exhausting. It makes you hate your own brain.
The Tuesday I broke my brain
On October 14th, 2021, I hit a wall. I remember the date because I had exactly 42 tasks on my list. I had spent the first hour of my morning just organizing them—color-coding them in this app I used to use called Monday.com. I hate Monday.com, by the way. I know everyone loves it, but it feels like a spreadsheet that’s trying too hard to be my friend, and the interface is so busy it gives me a headache. Anyway, I spent an hour “planning,” and by 10 AM, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of my own expectations that I just… stopped. I sat there and stared at a wall for twenty minutes. Then I went to the kitchen, made a sandwich I didn’t even want, and came back to delete the whole thing. Not check them off. I deleted them.
I realized that half the stuff on that list didn’t actually need to happen. They were “shoulds.” I should follow up with that guy from the conference. I should research new filing software. I should reorganize my desktop icons. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. A to-do list isn’t a plan; it’s a list of demands you’re making on a version of yourself that doesn’t exist yet. It’s like trying to pack a suitcase for a weekend trip but including your high school yearbooks just in case. It’s heavy, it’s unnecessary, and it makes the whole trip miserable.
The “Delete” is more powerful than the “Done”
We’ve been conditioned to think that checking a box is the ultimate hit of dopamine. But the real power is in the delete key. When you check something off, it stays in your history. It’s still part of your mental load. When you delete it—when you look at a task and say, “This doesn’t actually matter enough to take up space in my life”—the weight just vanishes.
The Anti-To-Do List isn’t about what you did; it’s about what you dared to ignore.
I started doing this thing I call the Morning Cull. I write everything down first, just to get the noise out of my head. Then, I look at the list and I have to delete three things before I’m allowed to start work. Not move them to tomorrow. Not put them in a “someday” folder. Delete. If they’re actually important, they’ll come back. Most of them never do. Total lie that we need to track everything. Most work is just noise we create to feel busy because being truly productive is actually quite scary and quiet.
My 38-day experiment with being lazy
I’m a bit of a nerd for tracking things, so I actually ran a test on myself. For 38 days straight, I measured my “perceived output” and my stress levels on a scale of 1-10. I also tracked my “deep work” hours using a simple tally on a physical post-it note (I’ve given up on digital trackers; they’re just another thing to manage).
Here is what I found:
- On days where I kept a full, traditional to-do list, my average stress was a 7.4.
- On days where I deleted at least 5 tasks before 9 AM, my stress dropped to a 3.2.
- My deep work blocks—those times where I actually get the hard stuff done—jumped from an average of 40 minutes to 115 minutes.
It turns out that when you aren’t constantly glancing at a list of 20 minor chores, your brain actually has the permission to focus on the one big thing that matters. I might be wrong about this, but I think our brains have a finite amount of “RAM,” and every task on your list, no matter how small, is a background process eating up your processing power. If you have 50 background processes running, of course your main application is going to crash. It’s basic physics, or biology, or whatever. I’m not a scientist, but I know how my head feels when it’s full of junk.
Why I actively hate most “productivity” software
I mentioned Monday.com earlier, but I’ll go further. I refuse to use Asana. I know, I know, your team uses it and it’s “essential.” I don’t care. Every time I finish a task in Asana, a little cartoon unicorn flies across the screen. It makes me feel like a toddler being rewarded for eating my peas. It’s insulting. It’s turning work into a game for children. And don’t even get me started on Notion. People who use Notion for a “Life OS” are spending more time decorating their digital house than actually living in it. I spent three weeks once building a “perfect” dashboard with widgets and custom icons. I didn’t do a single lick of actual work that whole time. I was just playing house.
Now I use a $2 spiral notebook from CVS and a black pen. If a task is still there after three days and it hasn’t caused a fire, I cross it out with a thick line and never look at it again. It’s brutal. It’s unfair to the people who sent me those emails. But you know what? My actual job—the stuff I get paid for—has never been better. I’m faster, I’m clearer, and I’m not a vibrating ball of anxiety at dinner anymore.
The “Must-Delete” list
If you want to try this, you have to be mean. You have to be a jerk to your own schedule. Here are the things I delete immediately, and I think you should too:
- “Informational” coffees: I actively tell my friends to stop doing these. They are almost always a waste of time for both parties. If you want to talk to me, send me a specific question over email. Don’t steal an hour of my life for “networking.” Networking is a scam for people who don’t want to do real work.
- “Researching” things I’m not going to buy/use today: If I’m not pulling the trigger in the next 24 hours, the research is just procrastination.
- Cleaning my inbox: Inbox Zero is a trap. It’s a way to make sure other people’s priorities come before yours. I let my unread count sit at 400. The world hasn’t ended yet.
- Minor process tweaks: If the current way works, don’t spend two hours trying to make it 5% faster. Just do the work.
I know people will disagree with the networking point. They’ll say “your network is your net worth” or some other nonsense they read on LinkedIn. Fine. Go have your lukewarm lattes and talk about “synergy.” I’ll be at my desk actually finishing the project that’s going to get me a raise.
Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that we are drowning in options. We think that having a long to-do list means we are important or busy. It doesn’t. It just means we’re disorganized and scared to make a choice about what actually matters. (I still struggle with this, by the way. This morning I spent twenty minutes looking at mechanical keyboard switches instead of writing this. I have a problem.)
But the notebook helps. The deleting helps. It’s the only way I’ve found to stay sane in a world that wants every single second of my attention. What would happen if you just didn’t do the thing you’re most stressed about today? Would anyone actually notice? Probably not.
Delete it. See what happens.