To-dos by Mental State

Organize your to-dos by mental state and assign an hourly rate to your mental states. By classifying your to-dos by mental state, you can achieve your maximum creative output.

David Kadavy

As long as you have the proper due dates attached to your tasks, it doesn’t matter what project those todos are for. What matters is your ability to do those tasks in an energy-efficient way. Productivity is about mind management, not time management. - David Kadavy

Why mental state matters for your to-dos

You want to do the right to-do for your current mental state at any given moment. When you tie this together with your estimated hourly rate for each mental state, you’ll start to see how much your time is worth based on the projects and duration of those projects. The main goal of organizing your to-dos by mental state, you can increase your productivity through mind management instead of time management. This leads to more efficient work and more creative output.

The 7 mental states

Prioritize: Decide what needs to be done, and what can’t or shouldn’t be done.

Generate: Generate creative products, such as writing a blog post or brainstorming a podcast conversation.

Explore: Collect raw materials for creative insights. This may be reading about a topic that interests me, or listening to past appearances of potential podcast guests.

Research: Research to answer specific questions for a project, such as the year an event happened, or reviewing a scientific paper.

Polish: Refine a product and get it ready to ship. For example, editing a book.

Administrate: Take care of the pesky details of keeping my business running. This may be reviewing finances, or tweaking ad campaigns.

Recharge: Rest, relax, and disconnect.

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Watch a tutorial⁠

of this template:

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Read the original post here:

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Quickstart

Check out

7 Mental States⁠

and edit your hourly rate if necessary

Add your to-dos in the

To-dos⁠

section and see which to-do has the highest time value

View a consolidated view of your to-dos by mental state in

To-dos by State⁠

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