To-do lists suck and you know it. Sure, they are better than nothing because at least you have something that physically sits in front of you that you can write on and play with, but the traditional to-do lists never seem to get exceptional results.

The main flaw is that no priority is established for the individual items on the list, and because of this, what gets done is usually not what is most important in the long-term but rather what feels important in the short-term. This makes sense, because people by default focus on short-term outcomes rather than the longer ones (as most people have discovered at one point in their life).

I’m going to share with you something that I use which has probably doubled my productivity (although I have no concrete way of measuring this because I didn’t have the hindsight of recording my progress). The tool that I am referring to is also a list, but there are a number of important factors that distinguish it from any to-do list.

Below I have presented these factors in no particular order of significance.

HAVE A VISION FOR WHERE YOU WANT TO GO

This isn’t rocket science, but it never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t know what they want in life. The things put on the list should be in alignment with your goals and act as stepping stones to reaching them. Immediately remove anything that is not.

I am not going to go into detail here about how to discover your goals, but if you don’t have any, lock yourself up in your room with a pen and paper and don’t come out until you do! Taking action is next to useless if you don’t know where you want to go.

RANK EVERY ITEM ON THE LIST BASED SOLELY ON WHAT IT WILL GIVE YOU IN THE LONG-TERM

The stuff that has been written down on the list must be evaluated with a long-term focus in mind.

“A” grade tasks are both important and urgent and if they were done, would give the most leverage and lead to the greatest payoffs down the road of time. They are usually the more unexciting or unpleasant things to do. Your “A1” task is the ugliest one of the lot. Examples include making an important presentation or taking an action that is way outside of the comfort zone.

“B” tasks are also important to do, but these are a lot easier than the “A” tasks and usually not as urgent. They can be things like reading a book or an informative blog post.

“C” tasks are things that are urgent but are not important. While it may be urgent to check emails to be sure that you are up to date with them, doing so is usually not very important (with the exception of purposeful correspondence such as information from a team member of a project you are working on etc).

These are the things that have to be reduced in order to have time for more important things. You will spend your time doing something, the questions is what.

“D” tasks are simply ones that you have delegated to a specific date in the future, or given to someone else to do it for you.

That concludes part I of this topic, and part II will be coming shortly.

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This article is about you. It is best to approach it not from a detached 3^rd person angle, but from a personal perspective where you will look to see where it applies to your life, because that is why you are reading this (or so I hope).

EXCUSES ARE NOT JUST THINGS YOU TELL ANOTHER PERSON

This is the first key point. Excuses do not just happen in personal relationships; they also happen internally within your own mind when you “talk to yourself”. Internal excuses are the “story” which you tell yourself so that you don’t have to actually go outside of your comfort zone and grow.

The major difference between these two types of excuses is that external excuses are easily detectable; while internally they can be completely out of your awareness.

When you create an excuse for not doing what you should be, your mind will rationalise it as being a perfectly reasonable way of thinking (I know that this doesn’t relate to you in any way at all, but just play along :P). In this way, the excuse is totally covered up, and you will never be aware of it unless you can catch yourself in the process.

Now would be a good time to stop reading this article and quickly write down or list in your head 5 ways you tend to make excuses.

Thinking of this sort of thing can be very confronting; at least it can be for me. I first started writing out my thoughts on tiny scraps of paper in font so small that no one could see, and even the act of doing this drained my mind of energy and made me want to escape. This was because it was directly challenging my sense of identity, although I didn’t know it at the time.

By the way, did you end up listing those 5 excuses from before, or did you make an excuse and simply continued reading?

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

We are now going further down the rabbit hole.

Here’s a question for you: If no-one else will ever know about the excuses that are made in our own minds, why do we make them in the first place!? What is the point?

You may have already grasped the answer intuitively, or you could have just begun to get a clearer picture in your mind; whichever the case is, this line should either confirm your current beliefs, or give you a new deeper understanding.

The mind will create stories in order to protect a person’s sense of identity or “self-image”.

Pushing out of comfort zone means performing actions that are seen as “not you”; this threatens to shake the very foundations of your identity. Our minds are truly a brilliant tool, but they cannot distinguish between a threat to your current identity (via growth) and a genuine threat to your existence. This is why they will do things like make up stories that excuse you from doing something different.

To put it briefly, the story is a function of one’s own self-image.

YOUR STORY CRIPPLES GROWTH

Growth comes from pushing the limits; any body builder will tell you that if you want to build muscle, you have to push yourself to the point where the fibres of your muscle actually tear. They ache a bit afterwards, but then they repair themselves stronger (and larger) than before. Same thing applies for personal growth, but instead of having a hard workout, you have to get outside of your comfort zone.

The thing about carrying around a story or ten is that they keep you from taking the actions that would be needed for you to grow.  The story is like a blindfold, and those who cannot see are not very good at moving where they want to go without bumping into things.

The essence of an excuse is a distortion or denial of reality. People who spend time denying reality with quiet excuses will find themselves frustrated that they just can’t get things to work out for them, because you can’t work with something if you don’t acknowledge that it exists.  I’ve heard it said that people are happy to the degree that they perceive they have control of their own life. Based on my experience with people, it seems that the people who “make things happen” are a hell of a lot happier than the ones who “things just happen to”.

So next time you find yourself making an excuse, take this as a warning siren to stop what you are doing immediately and rethink things through.  No excuses!

~Pocket

To know this specific reason you will have to ask yourself a question you probably asked a lot when you were a kid. “Why?”

Every time you answer the “why” question, you get closer and closer to your specific reason.

In the example below, you will see that the “reason why” will be the second last answer you give. I will explain the reason for this in a minute.

“Why do I want to be a doctor?”

“Because I want to help people.”

“Why do I want to help people?”

“Because I will be making the world a better place”

“Why do I want to make the world a better place?”

“Because I will feel like I have contributed something.”

“Why do I want to feel that I have contributed something?”

‘In order to feel good.”

At the root of all actions is the desire to feel good (or not to feel bad). This will always be the last answer to a string of “why” questions. The way we associate what exactly is most pleasurable (second last answer) varies from person to person; this is your reason why.

The doctor’s reason why was to feel that he had contributed; this was what he believed would make him feel the most amount of pleasure.

Ofcoarse, some other doctor may have a completely different reason than the one in the example above.

My reason why is to have more freedom. Yours is probably different to mine.

Why is it important to know the reason why?

Because this is the only way that anyone can do something of personal significance. Without a burning desire (as Napoleon Hill puts it) we will be running solely on will power; something that we get only in limited amounts.

When I write for my reason, I can write thousands of words with relative ease, and have to stop myself from writing too much for the reader to be able to handle in one session. When I wrote an essay on the environmental setbacks of bioethanol and biodiesel earlier this year (something I am not particularly passionate about) I struggled for many hours just to scrape up a few thousand words.

Without a solid reason why, it is almost impossible to do the things you need to do on a long term basis.

That’s the reason why it is good to have a reason why.

~Pocket

Every gain has its price.

If there is one universal principle of life, it is that one can never truly gain without first giving something in its exchange. If someone wants to earn substantial sums of money, they must find a way to be able to give substantial value to their customer’s life. If someone wants a muscle bound body, they must pay the price of discipline and rigorous exercise (or possibly the medical price that comes from steroid abuse). It’s simple. Examples of this can be seen in abundance all around us.

This is as true as 2 and 2 makes 4.

Let’s direct this concept now to the area of personal growth, as I assume this is the reason why you are currently reading this article.

Personal growth, as I see it, is really about identity change. If you want to do things better, you must become someone who DOES things better, otherwise you will be acting incongruently, and you will eventually revert back to your “regular” unsuccessful self. The results will only be temporary if there isn’t change on an identity level.

To become someone who “does things better” (as opposed to someone who occasionally acts like someone who does things better) we must think differently, feel differently, behave differently, interact with the world differently, and experience life differently.

Change does not come from thinking old thoughts as well as thinking new thoughts on top of them; we do not have the time of the day to start thinking double the thoughts. We must drop the old thoughts completely to make room for the new.

Some part of you must die for a new part to live.

If we want to grow to the next level, there must be identity level change; be it as a conscious process or an unconscious one. Identity level change means a new way of thinking, doing and experiencing; and for this to happen, the old ways must be completely left behind.

This may sound startling for you to read, and if it does, then that is a good sign.

I once heard a man I admire say “the boy must die for the man to live.” This really shook the pillars of my reality at a time when this was so very relevant in my life, which is why I remember it so well. It implied that there is no middle ground between infanthood and manhood, but rather it is a threshold that once crossed there is no turning back; a metaphorical “line in the sand”. That is identity change.

The old self must be left out to die for the new self to live. Perhaps this is the meaning of “death and rebirth” mentioned in the bible, I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no way to move on to the “next level” while clinging desperately to the old one.

How we go about this change is different for each and every person. This is because it is an extremely personal process that can last several months or even several years.

There is no way I can discuss how one actually goes about change in specifics, but I can tell you that it all starts with a state of mind. Thought leads to action, actions leads to habit, habits lead to character.

Start with the inside first.

~Pocket

I was thinking about some of the goals that I have set myself and how I will go about reaching them. The next level sometimes seemed so far away to me, but I knew from experience that there is a way for “the next level” to be reached. I’ve done it before, and so have you.

I thought to myself about how success is reached. It dawned on me while taking a shower the following morning (as all good ideas do), that my victories never came from big, flashy actions, but rather from the small actions that were made consistently and never put off. The kind of actions which your gut knows will add up over time, even if they don’t seem appealing to your mind in the moment.

Success came from small but regular improvements. At first, improvements are unnoticeable and can even feel painful in the moment (like when pushing out of the comfort zone). These are called growing pains. They are ok though, because even though improvements are tiny to begin with, eventually we improve at improving; and then things really take off. The growth will accelerate.

This brings me to the question that has been stuck in my mind. “What would happen if I made myself improve 0.5% every day?”

As a typical engineering student, I went to a calculator for the answer.

After 1 week – Improving at 0.5% every day (a very achievable amount in my mind) would mean a net improvement of 3.5%. Not bad.

After 2 weeks – A net improvement of 7.2% from the starting position.

After a month – A Total of 15% improvement. I would imagine that even this amount of personal growth could make a massive difference.

After 10 weeks (2.5 months) – Improvement percentage of 42% (Pretty good, no?)

Today, this idea evolved to a whole new dimension in my head. I was thinking about a guy from school who I bumped into at the train station recently.

It was surprising to see that such a relaxed, confident kid could turn into a man going through life (apparently) with no real purpose, and had become somewhat “subdued”. I wondered if this was what happens when you get 0.5% worse every day, an idea that was slightly uncomfortable to think about.

This chance meeting really showed me that people are always changing. Life is always changing; there is no remaining at the same level.

Either you are improving by 0.5% every day, or you are getting 0.5% worse every day.

Ofcoarse, the actual percentage varies, but the fact remains that at every fork in the road, we have a chance to improve or a chance to regress.

People are always making progress, but it is up to you to decide in which direction that progress leads. No-one will make that decision for you.

~Pocket