If you finish your to-do list, that’s problematic

As a guy that prides himself on productivity, I’ll admit that the title of this post is really weird. As I dug in, though, the concept has slowly made more sense to me.

This comes from a recent episode of the Cortex podcast, where CGP got into this a good bit. It started as a discussion about prioritizing your to-do list, where he suggested you should simply consider:

“What is the order of the next 2–5 things that need to happen?”

Fair enough, sort your list. As he talked further, though, he explained that choosing those “next 2–5 things” means that some items will get pushed toward the bottom and may never get completed — and that’s ok too.

He explains further:

“You’re doing life wrong if you’re consistently getting to the bottom of your to-do list. If your to-do list is empty, you’re not reaching hard enough or you’re just not thinking about the scope of things that you can actually do.”

If your to-do list is longer than you can ever do, that means you can pick the most impactful items to work on and accomplish more than someone that finishes up a short, tidy list.

I see that somewhat like this blog, where my list of potential ideas is outpacing my ability to write about all of them. Right now I have 10 posts ready to go, but 35 more ideas (and growing!) on my list, with a few going back to last year.