The Done List Philosophy

Here is the quote from Oliver Burkeman's fantastic book, Meditation for Mortals

My favourite way of combating the teeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a "done list", which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you've completed so far today - which makes it the rare kind of list that's actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on... As Marie Curie understood, our default stance is to measure our actual accomplishments against all the things we could, in principle, still do. But that's a yardstick against which we're doomed to find ourselves perpetually wanting. By contrast, what makes a done list so motivating and encouraging is that it implicitly invites you to compare your output to the hypothetical situation in which you stayed in bed and did nothing at all. And what makes that comparison any less legitimate than the other one? (Plus, if you're really stuck in a rut, you can always define more loosely what gets to count as a completed task. Nobody else ever needs to know you added made coffee' or 'took a shower' to your done list.)

A done list isn't solely a way to feel better about yourself, though. When you start to view each day not as a matter of paying off a debt, but as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful number of items over to your done list, you'll find yourself making better choices about what to focus on; and you'll make more progress on them, too, since you'll be wasting less energy stressing about all the other tasks you're (inevitably) neglecting. And while I'm not going to pretend it happens all the time, you might even experience a few of those transcendent moments in which taking action on a project you care about - now that it's no longer serving the hidden agenda of making you feel better about yourself by helping you repay an imaginary debt - becomes utterly effortless and joyful.