Top of your to-do list should be to don’t do

HERE is a terrifying Sunday morning thought: a third of the year is gone and in two months you will be planning your December holidays. Littered with public holidays, the first third of the year in South Africa is not usually that productive and you need to be asking yourself what you have achieved as the months have thundered past.

Chances are that any New Year’s resolutions you might have merrily committed to on December 31 are a distant memory.

This week I stumbled across the best idea I have seen in a long time. It’s from the desk of Momentum executive Frank Magwegwe. I introduced him to you last year as the guy who slept rough on the streets of Joburg through the winter of 1993, studying at the city’s public library after setting up a small chain of fruit and veg stalls in the city centre, and eventually applying for a bursary to study actuarial science. His story inspires thousands every year.

Magwegwe has found that to-do lists are no longer sufficient to give him a real sense of control. Inspired by the business author Jim Collins, he has compiled a “stop-doing” list.

Collins asks what you would do if you received two phone calls today, the first telling you had won R20-million with no strings attached, the second from your GP, telling you that you had an incurable, terminal disease and had only a limited amount of time left on the planet.

What would you stop doing to create the space for what is really important?

To-do lists are useful, particularly if you cascade the tasks that need to be done from the hardest to easiest, as this forces you to first tackle the problem you might otherwise procrastinate about and makes getting through the list easier.

But stop-doing lists can be even more powerful.

Here is where you might need some help. You need to have the courage to get input from your spouse, your children and your colleagues, both those senior and junior to you.

Top of Magwegwe’s 10-point list: “Stop believing I have unlimited time.” Like many executives, he is prone to overcommitting himself, and something in his life has to give. He’s tired of letting people down.

These lists are deeply personal and are effective only if you can be brutally honest with yourself or have others who know you well enough to meaningfully contribute to them.

You might not like the fact that your junior colleagues realise that you are not fully engaged in the monthly meetings because you are sneaking time to catch up on e-mails, or that your kids know you’re quietly catching up on office gossip on Facebook while they are trying to connect with you.

There are not enough hours in the day to do all that is expected of us. Most of us fall into the trap of creating to-do lists that we laboriously work our way through in order to get a semblance of structure in a chaotic life.

Imagine creating the space to actually achieve those goals.

If daydreaming about a lottery win is an escape from the brutal reality of everyday life, it needs to go on your list. You really want a chance to win the lottery? Buy a ticket. Forget about it and run it through the Lotto scanner next time you are at the shops. Meantime, stop wasting your time on a one-in-13-million fantasy.

If you travel extensively, you might decide to stop taking red-eye flights. Go the day before. Set your meetings an hour later. Need a 6am flight? You have to be up at four. Just how useful were you to anyone by 3pm on the day you last did that?

Short attention span? Don’t sit at your laptop with social media or e-mail open. You are begging to be distracted. If you can’t switch off from work, disable e-mail to your phone. Or put your phone aside. Go cold turkey. Unless you are a hostage negotiator or work in emergency services, it’s unlikely that you are going to miss anything that pivotal over the weekend. First things first. Find a piece of paper to create a to-do list where the number one priority is to create a stop-doing list.

Like most journalists, Whitfield has a short attention sp . . .