By Alexa Corse
Jan. 30, 2024
Samantha Duenas’s plans for a busy Monday last fall went sideways from almost the minute she woke up. First she discovered the dog had been sick inside the house. Then she missed an appointment to tour a preschool for her daughter while tending to her sick pet.
Later, she took a moment to do something to help feel less overwhelmed: write down all that she’d gotten done that day. Her list soon totaled more than two dozen minor feats, among them walking the dog, making breakfast, running 3 miles, washing her hair and doing dishes.
Viewed that way, her day seemed wildly productive. “As a mom, I think that every day, you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Duenas, 39, a DJ in Los Angeles who also writes a newsletter about motherhood.
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Few of us start the day without a to-do list, but they can hurt as much as they help. For every item checked off, another hits an unexpected obstacle and two more tasks get added. By the end of the day, our to-do list is often longer than it was in the morning, deflating any sense of progress.
Taking the opposite tack—a “done” list—can give you that burst of motivation that to-do lists sometimes fail to inspire, die-hard practitioners say. Instead of obsessing over what you still have to do, take an inventory of everything you’ve already done.
The idea is to recognize small wins, no matter how mundane. Together, they can add up to a greater sense of achievement, says Gretchen Rubin, who has written books about happiness and forming good habits.
Rubin calls hers a “ta-da” list. At the end of every year she and some friends gather to write them. They get out pads of paper, review their calendars, and compare notes about progress they’ve made toward their goals.
“You remind yourself of how much you’ve already accomplished, which is often really surprisingly easy to forget,” she says.
Small wins drive performance
Often we try to motivate ourselves by focusing on a big, long-term goal like getting a new job or a new place to live. Trouble is, big accomplishments don’t happen every day, says Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor who co-wrote “The Progress Principle,” a book about finding joy in small victories at work. And long-term goals can leave room for discouragement to set in.
Smaller doses of progress can motivate us to do bigger things, she says, adding that managers can harness the principle, too. In a study, Amabile and her co-researcher, Steven Kramer (who is also her husband), asked more than 200 white-collar workers to write daily diary entries about the work they did, their emotions and other details about their workdays. The diaries showed that making progress on a meaningful goal was the most common factor when people reported feeling happy in their work lives, which, in turn, is a key performance driver. Even an incremental step forward counted.
“People love to make progress,” Amabile says. In her own life, she takes a couple minutes each night to jot down a few examples of progress she’s made in a journal, whether it’s working on a book manuscript or writing a note to a former teacher.
Amy Colbert, 52, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, has been working on a research project with a graduate student for almost two years. To keep it from feeling like an endless slog of surveys and data-crunching, she has broken the project into smaller phases for each semester, and notes in her paper planner when she makes progress on each one.
“It’s much easier to get up the next day and start again when you can see the progress that you’ve made, even on busy or not ideal days,” she says. She has been tracking her daily work for much of the past decade.
A résumé builder
Years ago, Sarah Kleist hit a wall of frustration over a series of fruitless acting auditions in New York. Worried she wasn’t productive enough, the now-29-year-old decided to track how she spent her time, writing down the big and small things she did each day, from practicing music for an audition to catching up with a friend.
Sarah Kleist says writing down what she’s done each day has boosted her confidence.KAY ELLE PHOTOGRAPHY, SARAH KLEIST
She took away an unexpected lesson: Maybe she could be kinder to herself. “Seeing all the stuff I actually do was a real confidence-builder,” Kleist says.
Kleist’s ongoing catalog of daily feats—she calls it her “to-done” list—has also helped her build her résumé as a web designer. Her website notes that she’s worked with more than 150 clients, a data point she could easily pull from her lists.
Kleist also keeps a daily to-do list, but some people are going without one. Jenny Vazquez-Newsum, 41, has ditched her daily to-dos since shifting to a done list. She used to begin her days running her leadership consultancy by writing to-dos, but the list was rarely completed by day’s end. Unfinished work tasks preyed on her mind while she cooked dinner or played with her two children.
After reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks”—a book on time management that refers to the number of weeks in a 77-year lifespan—she started this year by creating a longer-term list of goals instead.
She still keeps an online calendar for meetings. If she really needs to complete a task, she blocks out a chunk of time, though she tries not to do that more than a few times a week so it doesn’t become its own kind of endless list.
“I have kind of embraced that discomfort with feeling like I might miss something, because I actually haven’t yet,” she said. She also feels more energized about what she has gotten done.
“It just shifts the focus away from what I didn’t do,” she said.
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com
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