You’ll never finish your to-do list (and why this is good news)

It’s easy to want to wait for ‘better timing’ to attend to things that are important to you:

At some point, you or someone you know may have made remarks like:

Now is not a good time; I have e-mails to get through.

Or

Now is not a good time; I have some things on my to-do list that I need to do first.

Or

Now is not a good time; I have too many worries on my mind.

Implicit in statements like “now is not a good time” is the belief that there will be a good time in the future when we are sufficiently alleviated of to-dos, responsibilities, and worries. And it is only when such time arrives that we will see it appropriate to attend to other important matters in life.

Though seemingly harmless on the surface, this mindset can be harmful and tragic.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman speaks extensively on the subject, pointing out that “…trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster…The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of e-mails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”

The truth is — and this might be a rather hard and inconvenient one to accept — is that the ideal circumstances we often put our priorities on hold for are an illusion.

In Burkeman’s words, to accept this reality is “excellent news.” Because once you fully embrace that there will always be more things to do than there is time to do them (read that twice), you can finally stop postponing.

If something matters to you enough, just do it.

The timing may not feel convenient and it will almost certainly require you to choose to neglect other important things.

But at least you will have managed to do it in this lifetime instead of deferring it, regrettably, to some imagined point in the future that never materializes.