Failing with your To-Do list? || Acharya Prashant, at SPIT Mumbai (2022)

Questioner (Q): So, we often have many tasks to do in our day-to-day life and we make a to-do list, but we fail to complete it and the loop goes on every time. So, what can be the other ways to overcome this?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Right the right things in your to-do list, and then you'll be forced to complete them. The reason why the to-do list goes unattended and abegging is because it is full of worthless tasks. You write one, two, three, four, five, and six to-dos. Not one of those six is something you can love to complete. Love is missing; therefore, you find excuses to avoid those six tasks, six out of six.

Then you push yourself using the thing called willpower and with great difficulty, you manage to complete two or three out of the six. And two or three is enough to cross the line somehow and get you passing marks in whatever examination; life has all kinds of examinations. And then again, the list is remade next day, and again you find two out of six, three out of six. The cutoff has been cleared; you have survived for the next day to repeat the same story.

The problem is not the absence of willpower or motivation or whatever. The problem is that you do not know the tasks to take up. When you pen down something, when you assign a task to yourself, ask: Is it important? If it is not important, why must I pretend to give it importance? Why must I even jot this thing down?

Let me be bold enough to omit it or strike it out. And if something is indeed important, why can't I sit with it for five minutes and appreciate its importance? If something is important, don't just write down four words about it. Give four minutes to it, just four minutes, and ask yourself: why is this thing important? Why? What does it give to me? What does it turn me into? How does it help me raise me, strengthen me, purify me?