Why You’ll Never Finish Your To-Do List (and Why That’s Okay)

There’s something important we need to talk about.

It’s the fact that you will never finish your to-do list.

That’s not what you wanted to hear, perhaps, from a guy who teaches people how to be more organized and more productive. But hear me out.

Let’s start with the concept of time management. We often see time management as a narrow pursuit in the realm of productivity. But in one sense, time management is what life is all about.

How do you live a meaningful life? It depends on how you spend your time. So managing your time is pretty important.

If you had infinite time, it wouldn’t matter what you do today. You could absolutely waste today—spending it on the most meaningless activities like watching Jerry Springer or arguing about politics with strangers on Twitter—and still have, by definition, enough time left to do everything that’s worth doing, sometime later.

Unfortunately, we are finite beings. We live for a finite amount of weeks; you’d be lucky to get, say, 4,000 of them. But perhaps you’ll get far fewer.

Tim Urban, who writes the popular blog Wait But Why, illustrates the limited time you have on this planet as follows:

Uncomfortable, right? Take a look at how many more weeks you can expect to live. Life really seems short when you look at it this way. And that’s not to mention that in addition to limited time, we also have a finite amount of attention and energy.

Meanwhile, there’s a practically infinite number of things worth doing. There are more books worth reading than you’ll ever be able to read. More people worth meeting. More pursuits worth taking up. More trips to take. You will never be able to do everything that’s worth doing. Even if you’ve built the absolute best productivity system and you are as efficient as humanly possible, there will be an endless number of worthy things and people you cannot give your attention to.

So much standard productivity advice exists to help you avoid facing this uncomfortable truth. If only you could be more disciplined in your productivity techniques and habits, perhaps you’d have enough time to do everything! You’d have perfect “work-life balance”, being fully invested both in your work and in your personal life, without compromises.

This is an illusion. A mirage. A false hope. You can never become so productive or efficient that you’ll check every single item off of your to-do list. There is no such thing as “inbox zero”, in any meaningful sense of the phrase. There’s always more that you’d like to do, that you could do, should do, or feel that you must do.

So is the whole concept of getting more organized and being more productive doomed, then?

Absolutely not!

Precisely because we are finite beings, we need to prioritize. Precisely because we are finite beings, it means something to give our attention to a person or to a pursuit. If we had infinite time, why would we feel grateful that a friend or a family member spends time with us? They can spend just as much time with everyone else. But we don’t have infinite time, so each hour of our time is valuable, is precious. It’s a gift.

We just need to be really, really deliberate in how we choose to spend our time. Not just occasionally, but every single year, every single month, and every single day. We need to build a system to continually evaluate what’s worth spending our time on, right now.

This doesn’t happen by itself. We need to consciously develop the mindset, build the habits, and use the tools that will allow us to spend time on what truly matters.

Welcome to Organize Your Life, in which we’ll do exactly that.

If you join us in the four-week live program, I’m not promising that you’ll attain perfect productivity. I’m not promising that you’ll finish your to-do list every day. And I’m not promising that you’ll be able to do everything that’s worth doing. Anyone who promises that is lying to you.

However, you will find that the system we’ll build together is absolutely life-changing. Join us and you will no longer feel as overwhelmed by all of your responsibilities. You’ll have more clarity than ever on what’s most important and on what deserves your attention next. You’ll build a system that stops meaningful, important things from slipping through the cracks. You won’t be able to complete everything, but you’ll make conscious decisions about what you will and won’t do. And finally, you’ll start making consistent progress on the goals that truly matter to you.

As I said earlier, living a meaningful life requires continually deciding what deserves your attention next. But you can’t do that if you’re always overwhelmed. You need a sense of calm, which comes from having a system. Prioritization requires a process. Let’s make that happen for you. Together.

Join us in the four-week live course and become more productive than ever, in the deepest, most meaningful sense of the word.