Book Review! To-Do List Formula

Title: To-Do List Formula

Author: Damon Zahariades

Stars: 5/5

Review:

One of the new skills I’ve been trying to learn over the past few months as I transform my life is time management. I’ve looked at a lot of productivity tools to that end, but one of the things I’ve always felt buried by is my to-do list. In the past I’ve treated my to-do lists as a sort of brain dump, a place where I can list the stream of consciousness that weighs down my mind and makes my tasks seem like an insurmountable mountain. Turns out that’s not a super great way to organize your information. Who knew?

I suspect a lot of people have a similar process and while it is important to write down everything you need to accomplish, it is only the first step in producing an effective to-do list. This book breaks down 10 of the most popular to-do list formats, lists their strengths and weaknesses to teach you the fundamentals before showing you how to take those blocks and build your own to-do list. Zahariades also teaches you how to maintain your to-do list, the pros and cons of an offline or online list, and even some nice information about how to define and break goals into their disparate pieces.

One of the biggest lessons I took from this book was that tasks on your to-do list should have context, rather than just being a line on the list. You should know how long a task should take, what goal that task is progressing, where that task needs to happen, and who else you need help from to complete it. I also like his advice to write each task as a specific active verb rather than just a noun. Instead of writing “laundry” it’s “start a load of laundry” and instead of “call mom” it’s “call mom to schedule breakfast next week.”

What I like about Zahariades' approach is that he doesn’t tell you the “correct” way to do something. Instead he provides the knowledge and advice for you to build your list your way and tells you that what works for some people might not work for all people. I also enjoyed the conciseness of the text. At around 100 pages, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, or become an arduous task of its own to learn. Zahariades’ text is friendly, informative, and to the point so you can learn this skill and begin applying it immediately.

This is a great book to pick up if you’re looking to make your to-do list work for you instead of the other way around. I’ve begun applying the fundamentals I learned here and my output has already noticeably increased.

As an Amazon Affiliate I earn a commission from qualifying purchases. If you’d like to pick up this book for Kindle or physical copy you may do so at this link.

2024 Here I Come!

Hello heroes! I hope you had a restful holiday season and are set to enter 2024 with all the energy and motivation you need to fulfill your goals. I’ve been busy over the last couple of weeks, taking stock of what I managed to accomplish in 2023 and making plans for this year.

As for 2023, I am rather proud of the work I put in. Here are some of the highlights:

• Performed in the Hunchback of Notre Dame as the understudy for Frollo and as King Louis XI. I learned a lot about my singing voice and found a ton of confidence through the kindness of my castmates and the production staff. I have hoping for most of my theater career to play a leading role in a musical and I did get to play Frollo for two performances. It was exhilarating and I can’t wait to get on stage again.

• I survived my first year as line developer for Mutants & Masterminds and that was no easy feat. I managed several crises, both externally and internally, and I feel like I’ve finally organized my thoughts and have big plans for the future of the game. I managed to run several actual plays for our patrons, posted a bunch of fun things in the Patreon and elsewhere, and finished the text on a couple of upcoming sourcebooks.

• The Untold Stories Project continues to grow. We had an amazing Origins, ran several great campaigns, and holiday one shots, and we seem set to continue growing as we enter 2024. I wrote a post about that here if you want to check in on what I’ve been doing there.

• I got to go to my first Green Ronin Publishing Summit in Seattle a few months ago and it was amazing getting to work with the team in person rather than just as Slacks passing in the night.

• I was a Guest of Honor at PGX in October and U-Con this November and I actually felt like I was qualified enough for that to not be silly. But seriously, I had a great time running games, giving interviews, and seeing friends both new and old.

• I wrote about 10,000 more words in Titan’s Gambit and found a publisher for those next two books in the series.

• I took stock of my mental health and took steps to find assistance. I began medication for the first time in my life and I have a therapist I see a few times a month. I have been implementing healthier decisions in my life and have stopped borrowing happiness from my future in exchange for instant gratification.

It was a busy time, and in a lot of ways I felt like it was a transition year. I’ve been building momentum over the last few months and I’m ready to enter this new year running. To that end I have some exciting plans for 2024, including finishing the text for Titan’s Gambit and Tartarus Odyssey. I’m also hoping to release a couple of novels that I’ve been passionately drafting in the background: Dead End Job and Paradise Cost. These are couple of dark, satirical, comedies I’ve been writing over the last few years and I just know you’ll love them as much as I do.

In an effort to introduce some communication and accountability with all of you, I am adding a wordcount tracker to the home page of my site. It looks like this:

I’ll be updating it every week on Friday to reflect the writing I finished over the course of the previous week, so you’ll always know where I’m at in the writing process for the book I’m currently working on. If I miss a week, please feel free to call me out about it—in public if necessary. I want to produce so many things this year and I will need all of your help to make that possible.

I have more announcements in the coming weeks regarding beta reading opportunities, more updates for Citadel of the Dead, and potentially some podcast links, and this website is the place to find all of them first. Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!

Productive Rest

Hello heroes! I wanted to take some time and reflect on how I’ve been feeling these last few years and to vocalize a thought that I believe many people have. Stop me if you’ve had this feeling before: a mountain of work and imminent deadlines looms before you, filling up your mind with so much anxiety that it’s paralyzing. No matter what you do, you just can’t find the will to begin the project. It doesn’t matter how excited you are about the work or what the consequences may be of not doing the thing. It doesn’t matter that you are passionate about this project or that you nail it every time you do this work. There is just no budging. You worry that reaching out to your friends and family will just make them think that you’re a burden or ungrateful for the opportunity you’ve been given to work in a field or on a craft that you genuinely love so you sit there in stasis. Every day ticks by, the deadline gets closer, and no matter how scary it is, how important it is, you just can’t move. You sit down to do the work and instead open a YouTube tab and suddenly it’s 3am and you haven’t written anything. Finally the day before the deadline arrives—or the day after—and you have no choice but to roll up your sleeves and work until it's done, even if that’s a 36 hour process.

This happens to me a lot, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I’ve spent my whole life dealing with this pattern of procrastination and scrambling. When I was younger, and my projects were a lot shorter, it didn’t seem to bother me as much. I could knock out an essay in an hour or two the morning before it was due and still get an A. I could ace a test without ever studying. Nothing seemed challenging so I piled things on, as much as I could cram into my schedule. This behavior followed me into adulthood and persists until this day. It’s a habit I’m trying to break myself of because I can feel how it saps my life of joy and trying to be so many things at one time reduces the quality of my work across the board.

This piling is the reason I haven’t finished my second novel yet, or the other three I have in my work-in-progress bin. It’s why I’m always up all night the night before finishing my freelance editing projects and why deadline days have to be blocked out on my calendar. It hurts my relationships with myself and the people I love most of all, and I have been doing my best these past few months to break this cycle.

Is anyone else’s work pile smoking?

This is going to sound counterintuitive, but part of how I’ve been improving my mental, physical, social, and work health has been through rest. I know that sounds wrong after complaining about procrastinating above, but resting is not the same as procrastinating. I have been conditioned to view constant work as the path to achieving my potential but the lack of organized time leads to my burning out and a lot of other nasty side effects like irritability, depression, issues with memory, and other impacts to my general well-being.

I’ve been studying a few techniques over the last few months to improve my relationship with my workload and my need to rest and I wanted to share some of these here with you:

• Boundaries: Rest is something we all need to do, and not just when we’re sleeping. Even saying that now I feel a twinge of guilt and uneasiness, but it’s true. This guilt stems from my desire to be a people pleaser and my refusal to set boundaries for myself. I want people to think I’m useful and I hate telling people no, but I am starting to realize the truth in those cliche sayings about pouring from an empty cup or putting on someone else’s oxygen mask before securing my own. My refusal to establish boundaries with the people in my life, the amount of projects I take on, and my schedule messes with my time management and necessitates my mad dashes to finish things on time. You have to be willing to block out your time for things and stick to those blocks. Part of the paralysis I feel when looking at my massive work-in-progress pile is due to the fact that I don’t know when I’m going to do it all and the fact that those deadlines are far off means I can blow them off if someone needs something from me. One of the hardest parts about being a writer is being my own timekeeper. I don’t have a time clock looking at my face to tell me this is work time. I have to be the person responsible for that and until recently I was being a pretty poor manager. I would work on whatever was directly in front of me until something else took its place and the work began to feel like an unending stream because I didn’t have set boundaries to work within. You have to organize your time and you have to be willing to say to yourself and people that this is the time I do this and I can’t move it unless it's an emergency. I’ve started experimenting with an actual work schedule, instead of waking up whenever, working on whatever, and stopping whenever. This structure has been making my writing more consistent and I think better quality and I feel less guilty when I don’t spend all night working on something. It’s still a work in progress, but I feel like it is improving my mental health.

• Relaxing: This was a hard one to start implementing and I still don’t feel like I’ve quite mastered it. Basically when I used to “rest” I would try to find something productive and work-related to do while I was away from my desk. I would answer emails or slack messages while trying to watch scary movies with my wife. I would jot down notes and outlines in my phone while trying to play video games, and just never disconnect from the mountain of work in my face. This meant that I never really just relaxed and rested. You have to be willing to use your rest time as rest time. That can be as a leisure activity that you take joy in: reading, playing games, taking a spa day, going to a movie or just taking a day to completely separate yourself from the work in your schedule. Give yourself a break and don’t just step away from your keyboard to do work on the side. This one is hard for me and it’s a pain point in a lot of my relationships, but it is one that I am working on.

• Meditation/Self-Reflection: Part of the rest I’ve been giving myself includes journaling and mindful yoga practice. These are uninterrupted periods of time that I set aside the backlog of work I need to finish, the anxiety I have about money, the worry I have about being a good partner and friend, and just let my mind wander without expectation. My friend Pita at Pita Yoga is an excellent yoga instructor for this kind of free thought. She encourages me to focus on my breathing and to set an intention for just the yoga practice. Nothing beyond the hour we spend together matters during that hour. It rejuvenates my brain—even if all the deep breaths remind me that I don’t breathe nearly enough in my day-to-day life. Journaling does a lot of the same work for me. It gives me space to dump the information that is clinging to the inside of my brain and making me anxious and afraid to rest. It’s almost like transferring it from my mind onto paper pulls the emotion out and leaves the fact of what needs to be done somewhere I can reference it and eventually check it off.

Seriously, consider signing up for one of her in-person or online classes. She’s great!

• Communicating: This kind of ties in with boundaries, but I have spent a lot of my life believing that I cannot pass any of the burden of existence off on anyone else. I had to be strong enough to carry that weight alone because if I switched from being useful to becoming extra stress for someone else, I was no longer a person worthy of love. Which is insane, because I would never hold another human being to that expectation. Having someone that you can unload your burdens to is healthy and part of being a good partner. I have often felt like I shouldn’t add to anyone’s emotional toll but holding it inside myself has just been eroding the walls of my soul. I’ve been working to be better at telling people what’s bothering me, what I’m afraid of, and what tasks I need help with. I still have a lot of growing to do in this department, but it is helping me take the time I need to rest when I need it.

Sorry. I know that was a lot to unload in a fun blog post, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts and techniques with you in the hope that if you feel the same way I do, you don’t have to try to heal from it alone. And I wanted to share some of my own burden instead of carrying it myself. This year has been an important year of growth and learning for me. I am already making better habits and I can’t wait to see how my healing process continues. Of course I’ll keep sharing fiction and reviews and other entertaining blog posts as the year continues, but I hope you’ll indulge me with the occasional update about my journey. Thank you all for reading and I will see you next time!