For at least the past two decades, I’ve been puzzling through personal productivity, trying to figure out systems and approaches and tools and hacks that help me get stuff done. On the one hand, I feel pretty excellent about how that’s worked, as I’ve managed to make a bunch of things in the world. On the other, during those twenty years, I’ve also felt behind and overwhelmed, have procrastinated and mis-prioritized, and consistently fell short of what I actually wanted to accomplish on most days.

Looking back, it’s clear those struggles boil down to two major challenges:

– Not taking on more each day than could even possibly be squeezed into 24 hours.

– Actually doing the most important, but also most difficult, tasks on my to-do list.

So far this year, I’ve been thinking a bunch about the first of those two challenges, which has led me to pare waaaaaay back. I’ve tried to reduce my obligations, whether work or play, to others or to myself, in an effort to align my plans and intentions better with the limits of reality. And though maintaining that more minimal approach requires ongoing work—mostly, regularly weeding my commitments, as old obligation-adding habits die hard—it seems to be going pretty well.

Where I’ve continued to fall short, however, is on the second challenge: completing (or, honestly, even just getting started on) each day’s important but difficult tasks. Sometimes, that’s because other, genuinely urgent tasks crop up. More often, it’s because I end up doing a bunch of easier ‘bullshit work’ tasks instead. (And, at least once or twice a week, it’s because I self-soothe task list overwhelm by deep-diving into some semi-relevant research rabbit hole for hours and hours at a stretch.)

Thinking about the important / difficult task challenge, I’ve come to realize it’s fundamentally a question of keeping my word. In this case, keeping my word to myself. Putting a task on my to-do list is essentially a promise I’m making that I’m going to do that task. Each day I do other stuff instead, I’m breaking those promises, again and again.

Which is why I was recently particularly interested to discover a new exercise from Mark Forster, one of my favorite time management thinkers. His idea, essentially, is to build that kind of self-promising skill, incrementally, with a deliberate practice approach. Here’s how it works:

First, choose a single task (not an entire project, just something finite and concrete, a first step). Define what ‘completion’ means for that task (e.g., finish a first draft of the proposal, make the call, finish reading the chapter). And then do that task to completion.

Your score is now one.

Next, choose two tasks. Do them each to completion, in order. Your score is two.

Now back for three tasks, etc. You’re permitted to do non-discretionary tasks in the middle of each pass—taking on something your boss tells you to do immediately, going to a meeting, addressing a genuine emergency. But you can’t do any discretionary task other than the next task on your list.

If you do, your final score for the round is the last batch you successfully completed (i.e., if you fail partway through a seven-task group, your score is the completed round of six). Start again with a single task, and build up a new score from one.

The aim here isn’t to keep going up forever. Instead, it’s simply to increase over time the size of task group that you’re able to reliably complete.

So far, I’ve only been trying out the approach for a few days. And I still, decisively, suck at it. But I’m loving the approach nonetheless. It’s gamified in a fun and motivating way, while still providing clear, structured, and immediate feedback—exactly what’s required for practice that yields genuine improvement over time.

At this point, I’m not entirely certain that the exercise is sustainable over the long-haul. But, for the moment at least, I’m glad to be doing it, glad to be directly addressing my second big time management challenge. It feels like the best plan I’ve found thus far for building a fundamental productivity keystone skill: knowing I can make myself do something important just by telling myself that I will.