Procrastination, and how to pay off the to-do list debt

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Relationships are important, and when we have such, romantic relationships are often top of the list.

  • Today’s featured video offers a quick “relationship checklist”; how many would you score?

• Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness; it’s more often a matter of psychological overwhelm

  • “Break it down into chunks” is common advice, but a mountain of chunks is no less overwhelming to look at!

  • To get around this, today’s main feature outlines how to set up a to-do list debt repayment plan for yourself

  • It can also be beneficial to see what items are eligible for debt forgiveness, to continue the metaphor

  • If all else fails, sometimes declaring bankruptcy can be a way to get a much-needed fresh start

• Procrastination can also be a matter of perfectionism—we’re afraid to start, because we don’t feel we’re ready enough yet to do a good job.

  • See the bottom of today’s main feature for a separate set of resources for that!

• Sunshine is great for the health—in moderation! It’s important to have a shady place in which to take breaks, especially in open places like the beach.

  • Shibumi Shade has solved the problems associated with other shade-giving beach gear, for a very much upgraded beach experience. Check out today’s sponsor section if you’re a beach-goer!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The 17 Secrets to a Successful Relationship

How many would you score? This short (3:38) video has a checklist:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

🫣 MAIN FEATURE

Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt

Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!

“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”

So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.

Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.

Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.

This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.

A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.

What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.

Debt Reduction/Cancellation

Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.

We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….

Sort your items into:

Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch

• Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.

• Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)

• Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.

• Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.

As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy

Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.

Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.

He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.

We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!

In closing…

Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.

Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:

Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Shibumi Shade: A Better Way To Enjoy The Beach

If you’ve ever had beach holidays, you’ve probably seen parasols flying down the beach, or windbreakers falling over when caught by a sudden gust.

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Do vegetarian diets improve the cardiometabolic profile of people with or at high risk of cardiovascular diseases?

• How effective is physical activity in alleviating obesity-related inflammation in diabetes?

• Is the timing of COVID-19 vaccination associated with changes in menstrual cycle length?

• What is the relationship between intestinal stem cells and the gut microbiota in regenerative medicine?

• Intranasal inoculation study sheds light on nasal and systemic immune responses to SARS-CoV-2

• The microbiota connection, gut health linked to metabolic syndrome prevalence

• CDC warning as leprosy cases increase in Florida

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters In The End – by Dr. Atul Gawande

Maybe you want to "live forever or die trying", and that's an understandable goal... But are you prepared for "or die trying" being the outcome?

This is not a cheerful book, if you're anything like this reviewer, you will need a little towel or something to mop up the tears while you read. But it's worth it.

Dying is one thing; fighting for life is even generally considered a noble endeavor. Suffering alone isn't fun, losing independence can feel humiliating, and seeing someone who was always a tower of strength, now a frail shadow of their former self, reduced to begging for something that they're "not allowed", can be worse.

Do we want that for ourselves? For our loved ones? Can there be a happy medium between that, and the alternative to indeed "go gentle into that good night"?

Dr. Gawande, a surgeon well-acquainted with death and dying, thinks so. But it involves work on our part, and being prepared for hard decisions.

• What is most important to us, and what tradeoffs are we willing to make for it?

• What, even, is actually an option to us with the resources available?

• Can we make peace with a potentially bad lot? And… Should we?

• When is fighting important, and when is it self-destructive?

These (and others) are all difficult questions posed by Dr. Gawande, but critical ones.

We don't usually quote other people's reviews when reviewing books here, but let’s consider the following words from the end of a long review on Amazon:

Bottom line: we all deserve better than that. And if we don't take the time to think about what's most important, then time will take it from us. This very insightful book may not have all the answers, but it has the questions, and it can help a lot in exploring them and deciding what matters most to us in the end, really.

Click here to check out Being Mortal, and make every day count—because nothing matters more than that.

Wishing you a meaningful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team