Barring politics and cilantro, there’s little as polarizing as the to-do list. In one camp, you have the opposition, citing tyranny of overwhelm, futility, and a high likelihood of unforeseen circumstances thwarting success. In the other camp, defenders tout the to-do list’s ability to relax the mind, strategize, and reveal priorities.
I tend to have a foot in each camp, but I’m a planner by nature. I know what happens when I leave things to chance: I scroll for seven three hours on Instagram, eat an entire banana bread, cry along to an America’s Got Talent sob-story on YouTube, then try to build an exact replica of my house in the Sims. (Mike here: these are… exactly things she has done this week.) So, rather than spend endless hours researching whether or not a to-do list is actually going to help me accomplish my goals, I’ve reframed mine.
Studies have shown that forcing yourself to smile can trick your brain into feeling happy, legitimately lowering stress levels and heart rate. Fake it ’til you make it, right? If I can hoodwink my brain with a grin, I figure I can also fool it with my to-do list. Or as I call it: my reward list.
That’s it. That’s the secret. I frame everything as a benefit. I hold to a couple other principles, but this one is a game-changer. Here’s how it works: Starting with an affirmative “You get to,” I write out something I’ve wanted to accomplish and why. As I move to the next item on my list, I include the payoff of the previous item. My typical reward list looks something like this:
I acknowledge there’s a lot of darkness, confusion, and uncertainty out there at the moment. Maybe this gratitude-rooted method seems glib. But here’s the beauty of the approach: it requires you to identify what’s meaningful to you and why. It requires you to think about what you’re doing instead of just moving in autopilot. Beyond that, if it’s true we can alter our mental state through faking a smile, maybe we really can create a sense of excitement and abundance through the words on our lists. And as far as I can see, we could all stand a little more excitement and abundance right now.