Hypothesis

My task list was not a source of clarity anymore. It had accumulated stale, vague, and guilt-inducing tasks. The accountability partner should be able to help me complete these in a paced, stable and guiltfree manner. Task completion should become a cadence instead of a quick flurry to complete tasks in one go while getting flustered.

Also The accountability partner should not make me do more tasks. It should help me carry fewer fake ones. This involves grooming my “today” tasks list in a manner so that it feels natural to work on. For example quick but important tasks should be done in the morning to build momentum. Noon before lunch should have longer but time sensitive tasks. Similarly evenings when we are more drained should have more menial but obligatory tasks before wrap up. As Cal Newport mentioned in his book “Deep Work” we need to acknowledge that we can do limited amount of deep work in a day. Understanding when you are at your mental best and knocking the difficult tasks out of the park then is very important.

Setup

I asked the accountability partner to act less like a reminder bot and more like an executive assistant who triages, manages and grooms my task list.

Rules I gave it

• Kill stale tasks aggressively.
• Rewrite vague tasks into physical next actions.
• Separate blocked tasks from ignored tasks.
• Don’t create tasks that don’t really matter just to fill the time.
• Do not create dozens of tiny unrelated tasks in a day. Instead the tasks should feel connected so that there is a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.
• Try to keep the task list for “today” as stable as possible. Do not queue in extra tasks into the day unless its urgent or has a dependency on me to unblock someone else.
• Keep a big Master List of tasks I could be working on. All new tasks go on the Master List first
• There’s always a 24 hour waiting period before I can start working on a new task. Often it turns out the task no longer needs to be done or seems important/urgent enough to be worth my time.
• Every morning should have max 3 priority 1 tasks. Getting these tasks done should be of prime most priority. Completing these tasks itself should be considered a success in itself.
• I can work on less priority tasks along the rest of the day and the ones remaining when the day ends can be rescheduled to the next day instead of staying overdue.

Before / After

Example:

• Before: Work on accountability partner
• After: Create one evening review prompt and test it on myself