The Power of the “To Dont” List and Why You Should Keep One

I tend to get distracted easily. I have the shiny new object syndrome disease. I tend to take time to understand what made me master a task or a skill and so I tend to make a lot of mistakes.

Which is why I have a tool in my box called the “To Dont” list. It is not my idea or a new one, but I have benefited from it a lot.

It is a list I keep of things I am not going to do.

I have a list of 3 things I want to do each week and 1 thing I want to get done daily.

I have close to 45 items on my To Dont list. Examples – writing a book, learning Mandarin, learning awesome photography skills.

Every startup CEO and entrepreneur needs a To Dont list actually. Why?

1. Limited resources. When you are small you dont have an army of direct reports who can each own an initiative and “run with it”. If you, as the CEO, are not spending time managing projects and helping remove obstacles for people, you are not getting further ahead.

I know a CEO who keeps blaming all the people she hired on her team for “not stepping up” to take responsibility for the top 3 items that the company must achieve. All along while she is working on priorities outside the core priorities she identified for the team.

2. Limited energy. If you are not spending time on your top 3 priorities for the day / week / month / quarter, and dreaming, eating, sleeping, brainstorming and executing those priorities, then your energy and brain power is being consumed by 100 other “shiny” non priorities.

It tends to be the “death by a thousand cuts” problem where 7 to 9 things take up your time, and before you know it, it has been over 4-8 weeks and you have not made any progress towards the top 3 things you need to achieve as a company to get to the next milestone.

3. Limited time. If you work 10 hours a day, god bless you. If you work 15 hours a day, you are fooling yourself into believing that you are “working and productive”. I dont know the exact capacity and stamina that different people have for work, but everyone needs some time to rest their brain, their body and their mind. 

If, for example, you believe you should spend 8 hours on your top 3 priorities and only 2 hours a day on your bottom 7 priorities, I still would question your ability to focus.

The main reason is that it is not time alone that you are spending – you are spending your energy, which is another thing you have in limited supply.

I know that Google has said you have the 20% time where you can work on things that you enjoy doing, outside your core priorities, but you are not Google.

You are a startup, with very limited resources and time.

If you want to work for 12 hours, daily, by all means do so.

Just make sure that your top 3 priorities get the all of your attention – until they are completed.

There are some tasks that you might believe “you cant make progress” on, until there’s something else that happens outside your control.

Bring more things back into your control by spending time and energy on alternative paths.

For example, if you believe the “customer” will take 1 month to get approvals in place for you to get the POC ready, try to get another customer on board, or work the org chart of the customer to get other approvals in place. Dont spend time trying to talk to a new integration partner since that’s not on your priority list.

That should belong on your to-dont list, until it is important enough to belong on your To Do list.

The To dont list should be as sacred as your to do list. Put everything in there that catches your attention until it is worthy enough to make it to your to do list.