Thought for Today

One of my favorite books of all time is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I first read it early on in my career, and I continue to come back to it again and again. It’s that good. Part of what makes it so good is that it focuses on both the why and the how of keeping what’s on your plate…

David Allen had a revolutionary idea in the realm of personal productivity: sort your tasks to do by where you’ll be and the tools you’ll have. He calls these categories contexts—and in the early days of wi-fi and primitive smartphones, they were game-changers. The idea is simple: Match your task list to where you are. If you need an internet…

Sometimes it’s what you don’t do that can have the biggest impact on your life. But not doing certain things can be really difficult, and require a lot of mental energy—even though there’s not much to show for it. It’s always tempting to put things on your Today Card (or to-do list, if you’re not using the card yet) that…

There are two schools of thought when it comes to personal productivity. Both are right in their own ways, but having to choose between them can be detrimental to many people’s productivity systems of choice. The first school believes that you should never put an item on your schedule if it doesn’t absolutely need to be done at that time.…

We’re all a little different. We all have our unique ways of thinking and operating. And nowhere is that more prevalent than in the rhythm of our days. Part of being a human is being subject to biological rhythms. In the field that studies such rhythms—chronobiology—there are 3 types of rhythms: Circadian rhythms - a cycle that repeats every 24…

It’s great to dream big. It’s great to have audacious goals and aim high. To an extent, it’s great to expect great things of yourself. But it’s also important that when you measure you performance, you measure against the right yardstick. That is, don’t measure yourself against your most audacious, bold hopes and dreams. Don’t hold yourself up to expectations…

The cornerstone of The Today System is the daily score. It tells you how effectively you followed through on your priorities for the day—based on how many items you committed to getting done. The daily score is critical to establishing a good habit of daily planning and reflection. But it only tells you the story from day to day. And…

Aside from managing your time, there’s no more important skill to have in order to be productive than managing your energy. But in order to do that effectively, you have to understand your energy well. A lot of people think of energy like we think of gas in a car; you can be low on energy, or have enough. But…

One of my long-time mentors once told me that the most important truth he’s learned is this: The quality of your life is directly related to the amount of uncertainty and discomfort you can handle. When you’re filling out your card each day, how much are you factoring in both uncertainty and discomfort? None of us can be certain how…

When I was on the Beyond the To-Do List podcast a while ago, the host offered up an analogy of the Today Card that I found helpful. It’s not a calendar, or an agenda, but more like a game plan. I think that works pretty well. And as anyone who has ever played sports can attest, having a game plan…

We may think that life has compartments—where things are separated by clear edges. But that’s not the case. Life is a grand, unified, hodgepodge of things tending to run together—despite our best efforts to keep them from doing so. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have some borders between our work and our family, or between our adult activities…

Time and time again, I’m reminded of a universal truth of productivity and performance: there is no work more important than reflection and preparation. Many times, I’ve fallen into the trap of having tasks on my card left undone as the day comes to a close—and I focus on trying to finish those tasks. As a result, I neglect reflecting…

I’ve been watching a lot of TikTok lately. And while that may sound like it’s not conducive to learning about productivity, I actually stumbled across a really good quote on it the other day. The person on the video talked about one of their managers at a fast food place telling them a piece of advice I’d never heard before:…

One of the challenges of confining your tasks for the day to a single side of a 3 x 5” card is the limit of 9 items. While usually the top items will require significant time and effort, there may be small tasks that are important to get done—and done today—but that won’t take a lot of time. So it’s…

The difference between The Today Card and a traditional to-do lists is the point system—which makes prioritizing front and center. But the points also represent something else: commitment. If you put something on your card for today, it means you’re committed to getting it done. That’s why your score suffers for each item you don’t work on. So as you…

I’m a hopeless fan of Eastern philosophy. One of the thyI love about it is how it embraces contradictions—or rather, things that the Western mind sees as contradictions. One of my favorite examples of this is one I’ve seen exemplified quite often as I push myself to be more productive: “slow is fast, fast is slow”. The idea is simply…

We are creatures of habit. So many of the things we do, thoughts we think, and moods we’re in are habitual. They happen over and over again—almost without us being aware of it. So part of the journey of becoming more productive is about working with (or against) habits. This is where it becomes important to not just look to…

The great thing about a to-do list of any kind is that it serves as a persistent reminder of what you think you ought to get done. But the persistence of that reminder is both a blessing and a curse. In many cases, it can turn into a nagging reminder of things we thought were important at the time we…

Especially if you’re filling out a card every day, there’s a tendency to fill it out with actions—things to do or to get done. And in probably 90% of cases, that’s appropriate. The Today System, like any productivity system, is there to help you get things done more effectively. But there’s another thing that good productivity systems should help you…