Reducing Life's Noise

Beta scratchpad of my very first To-Don't List!

How many To-Do lists do you have?  I confess that I currently have three:

• Work
• Personal
• A dumping repository of things I want to remember to do but are lower priority, such as the title of a book that piqued my interest during a weekend browsing session at the local bookstore (one of the few that still exist)

Despite the satisfaction of checking something off one of my lists, the items continue to grow ... and grow, and grow.  What if we decided to subtract, rather than add, to our lives?

This is a wonderful idea from Tom Peters and Jim Collins, the authors of In Search of Excellence and Good to Great, respectively.  I was introduced to it by reading motivation guru Dan Pink's excellent book Drive, and also found it on productivity expert Peter Bregman's blogpost on the Wall Street Journal. The To-Don't List is #6 on Pink's recent manifesto FLIP: 16 Counter-Intuitive Ideas about Motivation (downloadable from his site):

"The key insight of both Peters and Collins is that we spend too much time on addition and not nearly enough on subtraction. Yet it's only by taking away what doesn't matter that allows us to reveal what does matter."

Here's my list, strategically placed so that it's constantly visible (on my desktop, mobile, cube wall):

• Don't snack after 8pm
  (I tend to go overboard and end up with lovely case of indigestion)

• Don't accept meetings or conference calls I wouldn't have initiated myself
  (sorry Dan, I took that straight from you - it's a really valuable one!)

• Don't snack before practicing the piano in the evening
  (it's only to put off the inevitable)

• Don't go to bed after 11 pm

• Don't say 'yes' to requests merely out of habit

• Don't be a perfectionist when the task at hand doesn't require the extra mile

Simply writing these down has stopped me in my tracks even thinking about doing some of the above.  This evening I thought about snacking on something sweet after dinner, but it was already after 8pm.  Though I was sorely tempted, I remembered my new list.  I made a deal with myself: I'd wait twenty minutes and then if I still really wanted that snack, I'd get it.  That wasn't victory outright, but it was a start! 

That's how powerful writing down a list can be.  As Pink writes:

"... merely by making those productivity and satisfaction destroyers explicit, and facing them day after day, I clarify what is truly important to me - producing good work and spending time with those I care about." 

That sounds like a good deal to me!  

So, what's on your list?