Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying to do less, better. And, in the process, I’ve reinforced a lesson I’d several times previously learned: the relationship between the length of my to-do list and my productivity output is shaped like a bell curve. If I don’t put things on my list, they don’t get done. (I realize that sounds tautological, but I mostly mean that I’m terrible at remembering to bang out even minor tasks in the open stretches of my day, if I don’t have them on a list in front of me.) Conversely, if I put too much on my list, my productivity similarly diminishes. I use the glut of easy tasks to procrastinate around the important ones, or reach general overwhelm and don’t do much of anything useful at all.

So getting a Goldilocks length right on my to-do list each day – not too short, not too long – makes a huge difference.

For projects, that’s meant taking a Kanban-esque approach, and strictly limiting ‘work in progress’ at every level, whether quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily. And, by and large, that’s worked pretty well.

But a bunch of my time is also spent on more open-ended commitments – regular habits like playing the trumpet, meditating, or working out, as well as semi-regular ones, like occasionally deep-cleaning the kitchen, or making it to a museum, live theater performance, and live music show each month (at least when the world isn’t on lockdown).

For those habits, the best thing I’ve been able to do is to simply downshift their frequency – say, moving monthly ones to quarterly schedules instead – or to drop some of them completely. And, indeed, that’s helped further hone my daily list to a far more manageable length.

Still, not all of those de-prioritizations have sat well with me. While I’ve never been a consistent, daily blogger, I’ve at least previously tried to trend in that direction. But, in my habit purge, I downgraded my intention to posting weekly. And, in short, I missed it.

So, in the last week, I’ve been upshifting or adding back in a few of the habits I regretted excising or downgrading. But I’ve been doing it cautiously, trying hard not to overshoot, lest I again end up on the downhill slope on the far side of my to-do list length curve.

Really, it’s all just a playing out of one of my perpetual core struggles. For better or worse, I’m more a fox than a hedgehog. And though I genuinely believe I would accomplish more in the world were I laser-focused on a single life pursuit, I’m also passionate about a bunch of different things, and it’s exceedingly tough for me to give them up.

Hence, in turn, my tendency to overload my to-do list. So, even as I slowly build it back up, I’m trying to remind myself of my overarching push for 2020, my aim to do less, better. I’m trying to keep in front of me the old French proverb: “Qui chasse deux lièvres n’en prend pas un.” He who chases two hares, catches none.