Many productive people fall into a funny mental trap: They often overlook their own productivity. Sometimes the more productive you are, the more likely you are to beat yourself up at the end of the day, thinking, “I wasn’t very productive today.” The more full of activity your day is, the harder it can be to pinpoint the tasks you’ve accomplished.
Entrepreneurs and startup teams are no exception, especially with the anxiety and pressure of high standards and visions of amazing growth. Ambitious people measure themselves by their progress toward achieving audacious goals, so they often can’t appreciate a single day’s worth of tiny, incremental advancements that they’ve made.
How to Avoid the Mental Trap
Between starting Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen has already done monumental work in his career. Yet he was still at risk of falling into this familiar trap:
“You know those days when you’re running around all day and doing stuff and talking to people and making calls and responding to emails and filling out paperwork and you get home and you’re completely exhausted and you say to yourself, ‘What the hell did I actually get done today?’”
To arm himself against the daunting quest of making meaningful progress toward his big objectives, Marc came up with a system: the done list. He calls this his “anti-to-do list,” a tongue-in-cheek contrast to the much more popular to-do list.
Every time he did something useful during the day, he would write it down on his done list, which he kept on index cards. He explains:
“Each time you do something, you get to write it down, and you get that little rush of endorphins that the mouse gets every time he presses the button in his cage and gets a food pellet.
“And then at the end of the day… take a look at today’s card and its anti-to-do list, and marvel at all the things you actually got done that day.”
Keeping a separate list of accomplishments meant that when Marc took stock of what he achieved, he got an unadulterated rush, free from the nagging and the guilt about what was still left on his to-do list.
Find Your Small Wins
There’s value in the act of slowing down to record accomplishments that is inaccessible without acknowledgment. Capturing what you get done ensures that you don’t lose that value.
As Marc notes, “Being able to put more notches on my accomplishment belt…throughout the day makes me feel marvelously productive and efficient — far more so than if I just did those things and didn’t write them down.”
Chris Savage, CEO of the video marketing startup Wistia, writes about how magnifying your perspective on progress to count what happens each day is key to generating the momentum and joy to accomplish big things. He explains this lesson concisely in two graphs:
There’s a hard road to travel to accomplish big-time achievements and reach heady dreams, whether it’s making your first million, mastering the piano, running a marathon, or building a successful company. If you’re too exhausted every day to take stock of your successes, you’ll lose heart.
Rather than waiting for major milestones to celebrate achievements, recognize the tiny, wonderful triumphs that happen every single day. Turn this into a daily process of rejuvenation and inspiration after a hard day’s work. Your done list will energize you and serve as a crucial method of maintaining the positive emotional balance necessary to accomplish great things.
This story originally appeared in the e-book “The Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List.”