In my second year as a freelancer I kept a list of everything I might do. It ran to four pages. It had a section for ideas, a section for obligations, a section called "someday" that was larger than the other two combined. I looked at it every morning and felt, reliably, like someone standing at the foot of a mountain with a teaspoon.
The list was not the problem. The problem was that I believed it was a plan.
What a short list does
A short list does something a long list cannot: it makes the cost of each item visible. When you have forty things to do, adding a forty-first costs nothing. When you have three, adding a fourth means admitting that one of the three is about to be done badly.
I began to run my work on a rule I borrowed from the kitchen. A good restaurant does not cook everything; it cooks the few dishes it can cook well, and it takes them off the menu when the ingredients are wrong. Nobody leaves complaining that the menu was short.
You do not have too little time. You have too many things you have not yet decided to refuse.
Keep, finish, release
Each Sunday I sort whatever is on my plate into three piles.
- Keep: the one or two projects that deserve the best hours of the week.
- Finish: small things already begun, which are costing attention just by being open.
- Release: everything else, said out loud or written down as a decision, not left to rot.
The third pile is the one that works. Releasing something deliberately feels nothing like failing at it. It feels like clearing a surface so you can see the grain of the wood.
A note on quality
Fewer things does not mean less ambition. It is an argument that depth is where the ambition lives. The work I am proudest of was almost always the work I gave too much time to, at a moment when I had, by some accident, nothing else to do.
There is a practical test I use before saying yes to anything: if the invitation came with a date six months away, would I accept? It is remarkable how many things that look appealing today look like a burden at that distance. The future self, it turns out, is a much better judge of what is worth doing than the present one, who is mostly trying to be liked.
Arrange to have nothing else to do more often.
