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Ass-Kicking Email – When Should You NOT Finish Your Daily Goals?

Hey,

One of the big ideas of this course is the weekly/daily goals system
for productivity.

An idea that trips people up is the daily list. Namely, some people
beat themselves up if they don’t finish their daily goals list.

Just for the record, let me make a point:

THE PURPOSE OF DAILY GOALS ISN’T TO FINISH THEM

I type this in all caps because people often get it confused. Used
to familiar to-do list systems, students assume that the major goal
of the daily goals is to ensure you finish them.

Of course, finishing them is great, and I recommend trying to set
daily goals lists that are achievable so that most of the time you
can finish everything on the list.

However, finishing all your tasks isn’t the point.

—

The purpose of having a daily goals list isn’t the tasks “to-do” but
all the tasks you’re not going to focus on by necessity.

Not finishing your daily goals is disappointing, but hardly the end
of the world. I often get overly ambitious and am unable to complete
everything I wanted to do on a list. That’s okay.

The problem is when you start adding more work to your list after
you’ve finished everything.

The power of the system isn’t that it tells you what to do, but that
it tells you what NOT TO DO, forcing you to focus on a limited set.

—

The inspiration for the weekly/daily goals system (and the original
system that it evolved from) was based on a quote from Zig Ziglar.
In it, he spoke of a consultant who offered an idea to a major
industrialist. The idea was this:

Every day, when you wake up, write down a list of six things in
order of importance, for you to work on tomorrow. Then, when you
wake up, work on TASK #1 until it is complete. Even if you never
start TASK #2, you will sleep knowing you worked your hardest on
what was most important and you couldn’t have been more productive
using any other method.

After sharing this idea, the consultant asked him to try it out and
if he found it helpful, to send him a cheque for whatever he felt
the idea was worth.

A few weeks later the industrialist mailed him a cheque for ten
thousand dollars. [this was in the early 20th century]

As you can see from the origins, the point of the daily goals list
isn’t to finish everything. Rather it’s to focus you on what is most
important so that you don’t get distracted and procrastinate.

—

The big reason I suggest trying to finish your daily goals is that
it forces you to make reasonable daily goals lists. If you make ones
that contain an impossible amount of work that you never finish,
then the system doesn’t do it’s job of focusing you.

You should definitely aim to finish your lists, and the first step
in that is making an achievable amount of work. However, like the
industrialist, if you end up spending your entire day working on
just the top item from your daily list, you’ll know you’ve been as
productive as possible.