Remove Distractions With a ‘To-Don’t’ List

Quick Win

Learning to say no can free up space for what you want to focus on.

Try This Today

• Think about your current goals and identify distractions, like watching television during the day or checking social media more than twice a day.
• Find the tasks on your current to-do list that you don’t really need to do, like spending hours washing your car by hand instead of driving through the car wash.
• Think of stress-inducing activities you’d rather skip, such as agreeing to participate in an annual bake sale out of guilt or saying yes to parties you don’t really want to attend.
• Use what you learned above to create a “to-don’t” list of things you won’t devote attention to.

Why

You only have so many hours in the day, and filling your schedule with too many tasks can lead to burnout. Burnout happens when we have a lot of stress over a long time. In a review of research on time management published in Current Opinion in Psychology in 2018, the authors explained that prioritizing and finishing more important tasks can help us use our time efficiently.