Most to-do lists create a dopamine treadmill: press enter on Slack, press enter on email, get a little neurochemical hit, feel productive. But at the end of the day: “What did I accomplish? Did I actually move the ball forward in any meaningful way? Or did I just respond to people asking me questions?”
The reframe: look at your to-do list and ask, “What is the one, two, or three things that I can do that will make everything else on this list easier or irrelevant — completely irrelevant?”
Joe gives a concrete example: his producer was watching 20 YouTube videos for research and sitting through an ad on each one. Twenty ads at one minute each = 20 wasted minutes per session. The one leveraged action: pay for YouTube Premium. Cost: far less than one hour of the producer’s time per month.
“What is the one, two, or three things that I can do that will make everything else on this list easier or irrelevant, completely irrelevant?”
This is the difference between efficiency (doing things faster) and effectiveness (doing the right things).
Related Concepts
- Think like a farmer — plant seeds for the future
- Take the 30,000-foot view regularly to stay on course
- Busyness is not productivity