Letter 017 - "Not Going to Do" List

How to nurture your own ability to achieve strong focus

The last several months have been particularly busy and intellectually stimulating on the work front. I’ve found myself leaving many days with my brain feeling extremely pushed by the sheer number of threads to manage, tasks to accomplish, conversations to have. In the midst of the back-to-back meeting world, how do we protect space for ourselves to think?

Yeah, my GSD-GTD-GND way of thinking has been super helpful, but something was still missing. And finally, I realized what it was as I was talking to a client of mine, “Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who had talked about what you are Not going to do being (maybe) more important than what you do?” That idea spurred me to revive an old tactic of mine that worked really well when I was on particularly fast-paced projects: the Not Going To Do list.

A few weeks ago, I started adding this to my Friday afternoon ritual of planning out the next week, and physically writing down the things I would not do.

To say this has been valuable would be an understatement; it’s been game-changing. Writing out the items has been helpful, but it’s also helped me be proactive around timeline management with my colleagues at work.

In one case on the work front, there was an assignment that was due today (Tuesday), and I knew that having to hit the Tuesday deadline would take up space for me to work on one of my top three priorities. So, on Friday, I sent a note to the working group I’m with, explained the need for a timeline adjustment, and simply stated why — “I have another thread I’m responsible for driving that has a key milestone on Wednesday. The team needs more energy there, so we are diverting attention to this priority early next week, and I’ll pick up this postponed thread early the week after next.”

In another case on the personal front, it’s helped me to make sure I’m spending my free time in a way that brings joy. My commitment to myself this week was that, “I will NOT stay home every night this week (monday-thursday)” —> led me to reach out to a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while.

I’m going to keep experimenting with this over the next few weeks, but the interim results for me have been to: (1) increase the quality of my work, and (2) reduce my stress levels by helping to manage timelines more proactively.