Your To-Do list

Make your internal monkey your best friend.

According to Tim Urban’s model of the mind of a procrastinator, we have a control panel in our head shared by Gratification Monkey and Rational Decision Maker. Most of the time our inner monkey rules our decision making process until the Panic monster appears (burning deadline or danger). Monkey retreats and our Rational Decision Maker has to save the day. When the danger is gone, the Monkey returns as it’s very hard for our brains to use the Decision Maker thinking for a long time. Our monkey prefers simple tasks. So our goal is to make our task understandable at a first glance.

⁠

Loading…⁠

⁠

Daniel Kahneman introduced a similar model. According to him we have fast thinking and smart thinking.

How to cooperate with your monkey

Monkeyfy your task list (prepare clear instructions for the monkey)

Minimize distractions (get rid of notifications)

Execute tasks from your list (prevent your tasklist from becoming write-only)

Every task in a list should:

Minimize procrastination gap (for example, we have “send monthly report”, but before that we are supposed to compile the montly report, then write an email to the team (asking for data)

Begin with the verb. It should describe the action

Requires as little thinking as possible (to think as less as possible at the moment of execution)

The procrastination gap is the difference between what has been written in the task list and what we should really do. The higher the gap, the higher the probability of procrastination.

There good verbs and bad verbs for task formulation. Good verbs are those that do not require thinking e.g.write (the e-mail to somebody to ask something)

check/ask/remind

compose

read

buy (smth specific)

Also there are bad verbs, Procrastinogens:

research…/think…/decide

analyze the report

create the plan

read the new book

start jogging/quit smoking/learn Chinese

The reaction of the brain to this is, “I will do it later”.

Examples of good formulations:

“Call Lana to ask if she is available on Monday12 pm (instead of “meeting with Lana”) “Email George, ask him for the case description” “Find the message from Josh with a dentist’s number” “Google a picture of a minion for the slide with Q3 budget”

⁠

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.