Here is a small but annoying personal flaw of mine: I feel at my most productive when I don’t have many tasks left on my to-do list. That means that I tend to want to do the small, easily-accomplished tasks first, instead of the larger (but more important!) ones. You can see how that might be a problem.

The best thing to do is the “one big thing” approach, but as I’m tackling the one big thing, I find myself often distracted or stressed by the knowledge that I have a lot of things still left to do for the day, even if collectively those things are only maybe an hour’s worth of work total.

So sometimes, I cheat. I trick my brain a little.

When I’m writing out my to-do list for the day, if it has both a single large task that needs to be done, and a decent number of smaller tasks that I know will distract me, I’ll put a few things on the list that are actually already done. Small tasks that I actually did the night before or that only require 10 seconds of effort, like “check the mail.” The effect of this is that as soon as the day starts, I can put 3 or 4 checks on the list, and that gives my brain a sort of false sense of momentum that lets me focus on the big task without getting distracted by the smaller ones, because it feels like a lot of the smaller ones have already been accomplished.

I can’t do this too often, or my subconscious will build up a resistance to it and it’ll become rote. But every once in a while, it’s a helpful little trick.

May you reach all your most elusive goals.

Many people violate the speed limit while driving by around 10-20%. Very often, even if you zoom right by a police officer, the officer won’t bat an eye unless you’re exceeding it by closer to 30% or more. Of course, there are plenty of confounding factors there (which aren’t the scope of this post), but the point is that every day thousands of people routinely exceed the speed limit. Doesn’t that mean that the de facto speed limit is in fact 10-20% higher than the posted one?

People violate the speed limit, but they don’t ignore it. Believe it or not, even the people who are speeding are mostly basing their speed on the posted limit, even as they’re exceeding it. Let’s say you have a road with a 55 MPH limit. People might regularly go 60 or 65. But far fewer of them will go 80 – at least on that road. Put them on a road with no speed limit, and they might happily cruise along at 90 MPH or more. Why?

Because the posted speed limit is still anchoring them. Their brains are starting with what they’re told, and then adjusting up or down. But they’re not just pulling a number out of thin air.

I once gave a group talk on salary negotiations, and to start I did a little exercise. I divided the group in half, and to each group I gave a small 2-question quiz. The quizzes were slightly different. Here’s the quiz I gave to group A:

“Question 1, answer Yes or No: Was Rosa Parks 22 years old during the famous bus incident? Question 2: How old do you think she was during that event?“

Then here’s the question I gave to group B:

“Question 1, answer Yes or No: Was Rosa Parks 62 years old during the famous bus incident? Question 2: How old do you think she was during that event?”

The answers to question 1 weren’t really important, but I averaged each group’s answers to question 2. Group A guessed an average of 28 years old. Group B guessed an average of 46 years old.

Neither group actually knew how old Rosa Parks was (she was 42 during the events in 1955, by the way!), and so if I had just asked everyone to guess I’d have gotten a mostly random sampling. But when I anchored them to a number – even a mostly meaningless one! – they mentally adjusted from that number, rather than coming up with something from scratch. Group A mostly figured that 22 was a little too young to be likely, but was probably close; Group B did the same thing in reverse down from 62. The overall lesson is that being the first to speak in salary negotiations can actually help you, because you’re setting the initial number that gets negotiated from.

Which brings us back to speed limits. The people setting them might know perfectly well that most people aren’t going to be 100% diligent in strictly obeying them, but they also know that most people won’t deviate from them by much.

We’re vulnerable to anchoring because isolated evaluation is really difficult. If your boss asks you if you can get something to her by next Friday, it’s easier to adjust that up or down by a day or so than to step back and really think through a reasonable deadline, so you default.

Every time you find yourself compromising, “meeting in the middle,” or otherwise agreeing to something with a small change, take a moment of reflection. There’s nothing wrong with being mostly agreeable with people you trust, of course (like, presumably, your coworkers). But it’s good mental training to make sure that you’re the one in control of what “reasonable” means to you.

Every second of every day of every week of your life, you make a decision on how to spend your time. You choose to do one thing, and as a consequence you choose not to do approximately a bajillion other things that you could have done with that time.

The point is, you don’t need “more time.” You have exactly as much as everyone else, and exactly as much as you’ll ever get. You don’t need more time; you need fewer things. Or, more likely, different things.

That’s a mindset shift – people want “more time” because they don’t want to stop doing anything, but they want to do more stuff, and they’re upset that they can’t. Me too!

Some people look at time like they look at houses. You may have a small house, but when you fill it with too much stuff and people to fit comfortably, you put in the effort and get a bigger house to expand into. They think time works that way – if I just put in the effort, I can expand my available time. I just have to work harder or find a different organizational system or become a less distractible person.

No. You need to stop doing stuff. And people want to believe that there’s this hidden reserve of 20 hours a week of useless, hated activity that they can uncover and eliminate, and then suddenly they’ll have time to do all the things they want to. But that’s not the case – pretty much everything you’re doing right now is stuff you want to do.

It may not be stuff you should do, if the opinions of “future you” are taken into account. But “present you” wants to sit on the couch and watch TV for an hour a night, because “present you” is tired from a long day. And “present you” wants to commute 45 minutes each way from work (even though “present you” denies this) because “present you” enjoys the benefits of that job and equivalent benefits aren’t immediately available anywhere else.

The point here is that if you want to do something you’re not currently doing, you’re probably going to have to stop doing something else that you also want to do. Sure, your schedule probably isn’t Pareto optimal now, but it also probably isn’t hiding a hidden reserve of 20 hours that you can get as a free lunch because it turns out you’ve been accidentally standing in line for 3 hours a day to get into your own house or something.

Take a step back and reframe. Yes, you want to take that painting class. But you also enjoy the phone chats with your sister. If you weren’t already doing either of those things, and you had a two-hour hole in your schedule to fill, which would you choose? Remove the status quo bias, pick the thing you’d rather do, and accept that you simply cannot do everything.

Of all the things you can waste time on, the very worst is worrying about wasted time.

When you burn a bridge, you notice. Lots of other people notice, too. But before a bridge can be burned, it has to be built – so if you’re burning bridges at all, you’re actually still doing better than some people.

Some people never even build a bridge to burn, and unlike the problem of burning bridges, the problem of not building them is so subtle that no one notices – maybe not even you.

Think about how you made the friends that you have. Likely they started as circumstantial – you worked together, or you went to school together, etc. But then you liked each other enough or shared enough interests that you started spending time together voluntarily and now you’re friends! It’s a neat process, but ask yourself – why doesn’t it happen more often?

Every time someone interacts with you, in any context, they’re making judgement calls. What you write, what you say, etc. It affects how they perceive you. But they aren’t very likely to tell you unless it’s positive. If they want to become your friend, you know. If they think you’re a jerk, they probably just move on.

Now, maybe that’s on them – you won’t (and shouldn’t try to) become friends with everyone. Or business partners, or romantically involved, or what have you. But if you do want more friends, business associates, or romantic partners than you currently have, the first thing to look at is which bridges you might not be building.

Sometimes you think you’re holding up a mirror, but what you’re really looking at – looking through – is a lens.

And it’s a distorted one at that. It filters and bends and obscures. But no matter how you twist and change what you see through that lens, it never turns into you.

Don’t try to shave using a picture of someone else.

I think finding proper things to care about is a key component to a healthy life. I would caution anyone, however, against becoming obsessed with anything.

The difference between care and obsession isn’t just a matter of degree. I care about my children to a vast degree, but I’m not obsessed. What then is the difference?

Obsession is a dismissal of cost. I care about my children, so if one of them were to get very sick, I would be willing to sacrifice many things to make them well. If one of them needed a kidney and I could provide it, I’d do so in a heartbeat. What I wouldn’t do, however, is kill a stranger and take their kidney. The cost is too high.

Similarly, if I’m out at the park with the kiddos and one of them overestimated their native insulation and insisted to me that they didn’t need a coat, and then WHAT DO YOU KNOW they’re cold, I’m willing to run home and grab their coat. I’m not willing to take a coat by force from another kid at the playground.

I care deeply about certain aspects of my self-improvement. I want to be wealthier as I progress through life, but I’m not obsessed with wealth to the point where I’d steal or sacrifice family life, etc.

Obsession is a dismissal of cost. Only the object of your obsession matters; it’s exclusionary. It ignores trade-offs. Care, even deep care, is inclusionary – it uses the object of your care as one building block of many to create a foundation. Caring about the wrong things creates weak bricks in your foundation. But obsessing over even generally positive things is like stacking the same brick over and over into a single tower, rather than a strong foundation.

Creating circumstances that allow you to do things you wouldn’t normally do is a great thing. People talk about their ‘comfort zones,’ but you can bring that with you. Your comfort zone doesn’t have to be stationary!

The actions themselves are rarely the foundation of your comfort. Usually it’s the feelings associated with those actions, or the people you do them with, or the cost to make them happen. But those are all things you can wrap around a new action if you set it up right.

You can bring a few friends along. You can combine the new thing with old things. You can establish safety nets. You can mix and match all sorts of circumstances to let you explore the great wide world.

You can also just jump off the deep end, but not everyone will do that. And better to wade in the shallow end first than to never do it at all.

Past suffering does not absolve you from future suffering. If only it were so.

You may have been lost for a long time. Then one day, you discover where you want to go – but that doesn’t mean you’re there. You may be many miles away. You’ve walked so far already, so it doesn’t seem fair that now you have to walk to far again.

But this is the way of things. Sometimes you can take past work and convert it towards your present or future goals. Most of the time, you can’t.

If you use that as an excuse to not walk, you stay lost.