Feel good when you make a "check?" Careful...

If you’re at all like me, you like blue jello and really warm showers. But thats not really relevant to this topic. If you’re REALLY like me, then you get pumped about a rich to-do list to accomplish over a day – or a week. Productivity rocks.

Even if the activities aren’t tremendously exciting, its great to have our tasks in order and to understand their purpose and our reasons to accomplish them. For me its like being a kid in a candy shop.

However, though this strategy of organizing our tasks can genuinely aide us in laying out the logistics for our days, it can bring with it a drawback – if we are not wary. The drawback involves neglecting real purpose for the sake of penciling the list. 

Collecting ‘ticks’ can become more satisfying – in the moment – than actual accomplishment of our higher goals and development of our character.

For instance, maybe we put our cloths away hastily just to get the ‘tick’ – neglecting our real reasoning: living in an organized home and improving the functionality and aesthetics of our space.

We might have a visit with a friend on our to do list as well. Leaving after 10 minutes we might feel as though we accomplished something. We might think “hey, my to do list said ‘visit,’ and thats what I did!” In fact we might have neglected the richness of the interaction for another check mark.

Maybe we spend 2 hours working on a writing project just because that 2 hours was the allotted time. When the time is up, we may get a kind of baseless satisfaction. We come to forget the REASON for allotting two hours to writing: getting the project done and done well. Instead we might fall into the trap of “feeling productive.” We might accomplish very little, and frankly not do our best work in this time – we just relish in the fact that we’re “doing.” We are being satiated by just checking off the little boxes of our to do list.

What is this “feeling productive” that we are here referring to? You know it. Its the satisfaction that you get when you believe that your ACTIONS and your HIGHEST VALUES are aligned, that your behavior is channelling your resources towards what you deem to be best. Having this belief, and focusing upon it – we feel pleasant, we feel efficacious, we “feel productive.”

This can be illusory, however – and this is where the trap sets in! This is commonly referred to as “mistaking movement for achievement.” If we make check marks an end in themselves, then we neglect our own development and the higher reasons for achieving the tasks.

So what do we do? We must be mindful of our purpose for actions (IE: living in an organized space rather than putting cloths away – developing a deeper friendship rather than swinging in to ‘visit’ – finishing an assignment rather than working on it for a certain amount of time).

The challenge is: its hard to write a to do list consisting of just purpose alone. We might as well walk around with a list of our highest values. Important… VITALLY important… but all too vague.

Here’s a few easy steps for avoiding the ‘tick list’ pitfall:

1) Analyze “Productive Feelings”:

When you get that glorious efficacious feeling, reflect upon it. Think about the tasks you accomplished, or the one you are currently involved in – and determine if it is truly serving your higher ends or just your number of ‘ticks.’ Are you feeling alive from a day of genuinely aligning yourself with what is most import to you, or do you feel proud of a bunch of check marks what represent half-effort tasks which amount to very little in your life?

2) Affirm Purpose as You Compose Your List:

When you write your to do list – be it before you go to bed (so that you have the “sugar plums” of exciting tasks dancing in your head as you doze off) or early in the morning – affirm to yourself the purpose behind your tasks. For instance, as we jot down “read 2 chapters of book on personal finance,” we might affirm to ourselves that the purpose of the reading is not to “feel productive” because we crossed a few chapters off our tick list, but to comprehend and apply knowledge that will better our financial well being. 

3) Use Measurable Tasks:

Exhaustive detail is obviously not suitable here, but too little detail makes it easier for tasks to take on ‘tick list value’ only. For instance, if someone writes “morning bike ride” on their to do list, they might “feel productive” after 10 minutes of cycling. This is because their overly vague goal had lost its relevance to the purpose of the goal – which we will presume to be general health and fitness. Drawing out some easy specifics to measure our tasks can make them more in line with the real reasons we do them.

Can you think of some times where you may have derived satisfaction from an “accomplishment” that actually was not an “accomplishment” at all? Take a keen perspective on yourself in this regard, observe your tasks, and implement some of these basic ideas. Hopefully this will bring you make progress on more true terms, and will make a few tasks a bit more meaningful than a check mark on paper.

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