Open your task list
and find the oldest thing on it.
Not last week.
The one that has been sitting there
since March.
You have read that line
perhaps forty times.
You have skipped it
perhaps forty times.
That is not an outstanding task.
That is a decision you have taken
forty times
without ever once taking it.
A list fills up with these.
Ideas that were good in a meeting.
Requests from somebody
who has since left.
Improvements you genuinely believe in
and will never begin.
They are not free to keep.
Each one gets read again
at every planning session,
weighed again,
moved down again,
and the four things that matter
get harder to find
because they are buried
in a column of ninety.
That is how you end up
with a second list,
on paper,
beside the keyboard,
holding what you are actually doing.
The paper one is the real list.
The other is a museum.
So do the pass you have been avoiding.
Anything skipped ten times
gets one of two endings.
It goes in this week,
with a day attached,
or it is deleted.
There is no third option,
because the third option
is what you have been doing
since March.
Deleting feels like admitting something.
It is admitting something.
You decided months ago.
You simply never said it out loud,
and the person who asked
still believes it is coming.
Tell them.
That conversation takes two minutes
and it is more respectful
than a ticket
rotting politely in a column
with their name on it.
If deleting is too much,
make a file called not doing
and move them there.
Nobody will ever read it.
That is the point.
The ones that matter come back
on their own,
usually carrying new information,
and you will meet them again
in a list you can actually see.
A list you do not trust
is not a plan.
It is a place where requests go
to be ignored
without anybody having to say no.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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