I literally get paralyzed at the sheer number of things I desperately want to work on. I’m currently in withdrawal symptoms from giving up my aspirational to-do lists. I struggle with how to do it all.

Almost everyone I work with at Autonomous Creative struggles with the same thing: the impossible feat of handling everything and getting it all done.

I want to be able to handle it all and get everything accomplished. I have more things to do than time.

I feel such disgust at my procrastination and inability to fully commit to any one of the many responsibilities I’m juggling.

Sure, it would be nice to be able to check everything off your list. But that’s not the real source of this intense frustration. It’s that the stuff that does get done is the petty, unimportant-in-the-big-picture stuff, and the stuff other people want.

While the stuff that never gets touched is the real work. YOUR work.

So, why do we keep thinking about these big projects when life is so nuts and we never seem to get to them?

Because PROJECTS ARE VECTORS.

They may be beautiful or awesome or impressive in their own right, but what’s most powerful about projects is how they become the path to a new future. Here’s what I mean: You publish a book, and you can’t predict what will happen, but it might lead to an opportunity to teach, or to be paid for your expertise in a workshop, or to be interviewed on the radio, which could then lead to being found by someone who wants to collaborate on something new and exciting. The project is a vector, a path, to new opportunities, and to a new identity: Now, you’re an author.

Real life examples:

• My client Katarina was doing podcast production, which led to opening a studio, which then turned into helping ad hoc with other people’s podcasts, which then evolved into getting paid to coach.
• Another client, Charlene Lam, responded to her mother’s untimely death with a “grief gallery” celebrating her life, and that turned into a career as a grief coach.
• I made a 16-page photocopied minicomic, gave it to someone who worked at the Comics Journal and got a review…and that led to 25 years of publishing comics.

I realize I’m beating this horse pretty hard, and I’ll stop now. But I do have a reason: I need you to read the rest of this article with a deep-seated sense of your WHY. You are not wrong to keep struggling to get your most meaningful work done, you’re not manufacturing urgency. It’s real, and it’s important.

So, how do we get it done, in the face of everything?

The answer we usually reach for: be more productive! And listen, in my time, I’ve been addicted to productivity hacks. I’ve read the books, I’ve paid for the apps, I’ve used paper, I’ve used phone reminders, I’ve hidden my phone.

None of it works because it’s simply rearranging the deck chairs. It’s not dealing with the fact that the promenade of the Titanic should be full of life boats.

It doesn’t solve the fact that for most of us, there’s just far more on the list than is humanly possible to pull off, like, in a lifetime. Several lifetimes.

And we’re trying to do it all while also handling all the other life-stuff. Time-intensive commitments like, oh, say, a full-time job? Or parenting a small child. Or childing a cranky and uncooperative elder parent.

Add in mental and physical health challenges, relationship pressures, all kinds of things. Those all take up bandwidth, and let’s be honest: they always will. All those factors and more, while they do fluctuate over time, are simply facts of life. They’re not failures of character.

[If you came here from checking your Capacity Meter, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t done yours yet, you can go here to do a Capacity Checkup and measure your capacity right now.]

And then there’s PRODUCTIVITY. “Productivity” is all about adding more IN. It asks, how can you fit MORE things into a given span of time?

I don’t want you to do more. More will never be the answer. Nor is it to wait “until things calm down.” The way you’re living now is not crisis mode (unless it is, in which case, please go take care of yourself!). It’s (your) human condition.

The answer is to do less, on purpose.

Do less, but more of the right things

The most painful moments in coaching often come from when people feel obligated to finish endless to-do lists, and when they inevitably can’t, they get trapped in a shame spiral, which leads to avoiding the work and procrastination, which makes the list even more overwhelming and scary.

But the goal of task management isn’t to manage tasks.

It’s to allow you to make thoughtful decisions about what you will do, and even more importantly, what you won’t. Not now. Possibly not ever.

That’s what I mean when I say, do less, “on purpose.” Those daily, empowered decisions can add up to massive change over time.

Now, rubber meets road: We need a simple day-to-day way to make those decisions.

What is a “Top 3”?

In practice, it’s a quick (5-ish minute) routine to make strategic decisions about what gets your time tomorrow.

I’ll go through the process in detail below, but here’s the high-level overview:

The night before: Look at your list of possible things to do. Then glance at your calendar and existing commitments for tomorrow. Depending on how much time you’re likely to have available, pick your top 1-3 tasks for tomorrow. Write them on a sticky note or somewhere you’re going to see it and be reminded first thing.

Your job tomorrow is to do those Top 3 (or one!) tasks.

That’s it.

Imagine how great it will feel to check off those things and say, I win! I’m DONE!

It’s a simple routine, but surprisingly difficult to implement initially. This is for a few reasons, starting with The List itself, specifically, what I call the Red Zone.

Exit the Red Zone

I asked you to feel deeply why it’s so important to finish your own work. But sometimes claiming your ambition can feel like a trap. When you say, “This is what I truly want,” out loud, and you add it to your to-do list, then if it doesn’t somehow happen, it can make you feel worse.

This is the trap that probably brought you to this article in the first place.

The problem is what Jennifer Louden calls “aspirational planning.”

“Aspirational” planning stems from thinking you’ve planned to do something without acknowledging your reality. Without making choices…but simply wishing that you had more time, money, guts, or a magic wand.

Aspirational planning leads to living in the Red Zone.

This is a screenshot of my task management app as of a number of years ago, before I figured this out. On that day, a Sunday, I had 13 tasks scheduled. And 29 past due.

OK, let’s get real: First of all, no freaking way was I getting 13 things done on a Sunday. Or 28 on a Monday.

Secondly, what was I planning to do about those past-due items? Rent a time machine to go back and finish? I was living in the Red Zone.

You’ve underlined them in red, or put an asterisk next to them, or if you’re using digital task management like I was, they might turn red on their own once the date you assigned them is past.

Unless it’s a bill payment or your taxes, for the most part, “past due” is a myth. Who says it was due? Why?

When you live in the Red Zone, all that glaring red is a shame trigger. You’ll hate your list, and hate yourself for not having better control of it. Anything that’s a source of shame will cause you to run away to avoid it. And that means the problem gets worse.

If you’ve got anything in your Red Zone, your first job is to go in there and resolve all the past-due items. The fact that they’re “late” is no longer relevant information. You can’t go back and finish them when you intended to. Instead, address the reality you live in now.

Here’s how to resolve “past-due” tasks in your Red Zone:

A calendar is NOT a to-do list. A calendar is a very imperfect picture, lacking detail and nuance, of your time and your capacity. A to-do list is a collection point for possible ways you could invest your capacity. So when you put a date on “start the outline” on your to-do list, you’re not automatically assigning the capacity. It’s aspirational.

Clearing your Red Zone is how you start coming to grips with that distinction. For each Red Zone item, you have several options:

• Delete. Your best, most powerful option. Choose this if it’s no longer relevant or you don’t want to do it.
• If it’s something you do want to do sometime, but it doesn’t have a real due date, take the date off, and put the task somewhere safe, where Future You can decide when and whether to do it. (Where?? See below to learn about how to make a comfy Tasks Green Room where possible future tasks can wait their turn.)
• Reschedule it for a realistic future date. Reminder: that date is probably also busy. Do you really have a deadline for this? Or is it aspirational? If there’s no real deadline, put it in the Green Room. You can decide when you’ll do this later.

Most importantly: Absolutely no past-due dates allowed.

This is YOU, deciding. Back in charge! Feels amazing, right?

So, then, why do we keep doing this to ourselves??

Overloading yourself is due to more than just external pressures. It’s also triggered by a biological safety function of your brain kicking in…truly ancient, monkey-brain wiring. It’s called Scarcity.

What is scarcity?

Scarcity, as defined by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, the authors of the book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How it Defines Our Lives, is a perceived lack of something, in this case, time.

This perceived lack causes you to snap into scarcity tunnel-mode where all you can think about is solving that scarcity, stat. Today. Now. This hyper-focus on right now causes you to temporarily lose access to long-term thinking. This happens in milliseconds, and you can’t just opt out. It’s very literally not your fault.

That’s also the catch-22 that Mullainathan and Shafir call the Scarcity Trap. Once you’re in this survival mode, you can’t decide your way out, because your thinking brain has been shut down by the primitive part of your brain that’s mainly tasked with keeping you alive. [Read more about the neuroscience of scarcity and how to build capacity against the scarcity trap here.]

Example: When you thought about your Red Zone then and felt overwhelmed because you realized you’re over capacity, where did your brain go?

For a lot of people, the immediate reaction might be to grab your list and churn through a few easy wins, clear the decks a little. You know, try to do something about that crazy-long list.

This is because when we talked about your Red Zone, nothing changed about your list or your capacity, but you suddenly PERCEIVED a lack of time, and that put you into scarcity thinking.

But if you now go do those little bitty things that don’t matter all that much and use up all your available time, you’ll end up with more Red Zone pileup, and in particular with the big stuff that weighs on you.

That’s the Scarcity Trap in action.

How can you escape the Scarcity trap?

If it’s automatic, and biological…is it inevitable?

Scarcity is a short-term reaction to a sense of lack right now, in this moment.

So the way to avoid scarcity is to put in guardrails ahead of time, before scarcity kicks in.

Why you set your Top 3 the night before

In my article about creative habits, I explored the concept of “pre-deciding”. As I said there, Pre-deciding means making highly specific decisions about when, where, and how you’ll do the work…ahead of time. Of course, pre-deciding is really just deciding. The term is my way of reinforcing that the decision happens well before it needs to be implemented.

That’s why, even though setting your Top 3s is a routine that’s designed to fix your mornings, so you know exactly what you’re doing when you get started, you actually do the routine the night before. Night before, you can tap into your thinking brain and make a little plan for Future You.

When you decide what’s important ahead of time, you’re not in a reactive state when you start your day.

If you try to decide in the morning when the email, Slack, texts, social media, news, games, meetings, etc. start flying at you, their immediate demands will put you into survival mode, your monkey brain, which don’t think so good.

I don’t wake up knowing ‘this what I’m going to work on’… I want to let creativity be my guide. But it’s not my guide. Chaos is my guide. Creativity is like: ‘Hey dummy, why don’t you make a little plan and we could get some stuff done.’ — Amy, a Creative Focus student

A Baylor University study showed that people who write detailed to-do lists for the next day in the evening fell asleep an average of 9 minutes more quickly than those who didn’t. This makes perfect sense to me: if I know I’ve given some thought to how I will take care of the burning-hot pressing tasks facing me (whether tomorrow or at some other time), I’m going to be more relaxed.

But when you do pre-decide your Top 3, you’re going to be deciding NOT to do a whole heckuva lot of things. And a bunch of them are things you really do want or need to do.

What do you do with all of that?

Build your Green Room

In real life, the Green Room is a backstage lounge. In a theater, studio, or concert hall, it’s where performers relax or wait before it’s their turn to be on stage.

Yes, in practice, this is another list. But it’s a special list. It’s persistent, but most of the time, invisible. You keep it long-term, add to it as you have new tasks to keep track of, but store it out of sight when you’re not actively pre-deciding your Top 3.

Why? Because seeing your entire list will throw you into scarcity-brain and keep shutting down your long-term thinking brain throughout your day.

Your Green Room can be in any text format (a note on your phone, a notebook, a Google Doc…) and it should have the following sections:

• On Deck/Pending (Short term. You hope to get back to this, or at least consider it, within a month)
• Short Term Hold (Within the next couple of months)
• Cold Storage (Longer term, but you intend to pick it up again)

Keep your Tasks Green Room out of sight until you’re using it to set your Top 3 or you’re adding things to it.

OK, so now you know why to set your Top 3 (to avoid the Scarcity Trap). You know when to set your Top 3 (the night before). You know what a Top 3 solves (the Red Zone). You even know where to put things that don’t make your Top 3 (the Tasks Green Room).

Just one more tiny detail… HOW do you set a Top 3?

How to set your Top 3

At the end of your day, think about tomorrow.

1. Gather your options for to-dos into one place. If they’re already in your Tasks Green Room, open that up and look over it.
2. Check your calendar for the next day and make note of any meetings, deadlines, or important tasks. Get a sense of your available capacity tomorrow.
3. Depending on how much time you’re likely to have available, pick your top 1-3 tasks for tomorrow. One of these should be your creative work.
4. Write them on a sticky note or somewhere you’re going to see it and be reminded first thing.
5. Add blocks of time to your calendar for your Top 3 if needed. On consideration, is it looking like you don’t have time for 3? Make it your Top 1.
6. Put everything else in your Tasks Green Room and stow that away until tomorrow end-of-day.

Does that sound bananas? What about all the other stuff on your list?

If you’ve actually got time for all of that, good for you. But if you don’t? It’s a hard realization to face, but it’s more important to know what you really can do, and take control of which those things will be, than to live in denial of the finitude of time. That’s Red-Zone-land.

“Top 3s helped me see that I can drive my days rather than my days driving me.” — a Creative Focus student

Pay Yourself First with your time

Remember how we talked about how crucial it is to embrace your most important self-generated projects, even in the face of everything else clamoring for your attention? Projects are vectors for everything you want out of your life.

BUT there are massive forces pushing back against you taking that time and attention for yourself. People who want your help or your labor. Megacorporations who want every iota of your attention, and who hire highly-paid experts to engineer their products to capture it.

It is hard. But it is your job, and no one else’s, to choose your own work.

You have to choose your work because no one else will choose it for you

No one is going to say, hey I know I really need that report from you, or I know you make dinner and clean up every day, but you know what, today I want you to work on your book instead!

The only way the things you want to get done WILL get done is if you PAY YOURSELF FIRST with your time.

Easier said than done, of course. But the painful truth is, if you want to do the things that really matter—I mean ever, in your life—you have to stop trying to clear the decks to somehow ‘earn’ the time for those projects. There is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.

The “Pay Yourself First” concept comes from personal finance world. The idea is that, if you pay all your bills and spend on your various expenses all week, when you get to the end of the week there will be nothing left to save. But, if you pay yourself first, if you put money into savings BEFORE you start spending, then you’ll find a way to make the money work and you’ll be building your future.

So how can you Pay Yourself First in reality?

1. Use your Top 3s to put your creative project into a time slot in your calendar, before you assign time to anything else. Once more for those in the back: YOUR time for your projects, goes into your calendar first.
2. Or more generally, establish a creative habit. This looks like setting aside a non-negotiable time slot each day or week to work on your One Project, even if it’s just for 30 minutes. Build project time into your routine, so it becomes an automatic part of your schedule rather than something you try to squeeze in when you have time.
3. Protect that time like a mama wolf. Do not let anyone else steal your time. You work around it. You don’t cancel it.
4. Trust the system. You will finish.

What belongs on your Top 3 (and what does not)

Is the top three just for creative work? What if I have a whole bunch of other stuff to do?

One of the foundational principles I work from is not “work-life balance,” but the acknowledgement that all domains of your life live side by side in full integration. Therefore, your Top 3 reach across all domains of your life. They may contain a creative project session, a meeting with your boss, helping your kid finish a book report, planning a dinner party, or finishing the laundry. Whatever the Top 3 things are for your day, that’s what belongs on the list.

However, you don’t need to include things like “do my workout” if you will work out anyway. Top 3s are for the capacity you have available above and beyond commitments you already handle regularly and don’t question.

I have so much stuff on my to-do list. How can I make sure my creative work gets on the list?

If you’re finding that your Top 3 has way too little in the way of work on your important self-generated projects, that’s a call to reassess priorities: What are you allowing to take that top slot that is not as important as your work?

Really Jessica? Only three?

Calling it “Top 3” is a nice round number. It might be two. It might be four. But if it’s regularly turning into five or six, you need to take a look at what you’re asking of yourself. If you’re regularly having to reschedule, dial your list back down to three.

I’m a very gritty person. I get a lot done. But I have shut-down logs (see below) where I keep track of what I did on a given day that go back years. And when I look back over my notes, I usually only ever finish one to maybe four chunky tasks a day, on top of simply living my life. Making my daily list longer just means I’m creating more backlog that needs to be rescheduled so it doesn’t fall into the Red Zone. And when that starts happening regularly, it’s a sign that I haven’t been putting enough energy into pre-deciding.

What will trip you up: the dilemmas

You already fill 24 hours a day every day with something.

So, saying yes to your work, especially if you haven’t been doing very much of that lately, by necessity means that you will be saying no to other things that you have been doing.

I know that is super hard. That’s because it represents a dilemma. A dilemma is a choice between two or more options where all the options have both negative and positive outcomes. Meaning there’s no clean choice. There’s no win-win. You will have to say no to something, or someone, you don’t want to say no to.

A full guide to saying no is coming. But in the meantime, let’s just acknowledge that some kind of no is going to have to happen. So let’s practice with just one.

Baby steps: Say NO to one thing you really really want to do tomorrow

Take a look at the list of things that you’re deciding among for your top three. Pick one that you might have otherwise put on your list, and commit to not do that tomorrow.

And it has to hurt a little bit to count. If it’s not hard to choose, it’s not really a dilemma.

We’re not talking about giving up bad habits, like, “I won’t doomscroll tomorrow.” Nobody wants to doomscroll. Instead, choose something like, I will not take care of the three baskets of laundry sitting around my room, even though they’re really bothering me, so that I can spend half an hour on my book.

It is a trade-off. And it’s worth it. You can do it.

Make it a habit: the shut-down routine

Now that you have the full Top 3 routine down, the next struggle you’ll face is consistency. The Top 3 routine doesn’t have to take long, but you’re likely to forget it, or be tempted to skip it because you’re in a rush. But skip it, and tomorrow you’ll find yourself trying to decide in the morning when everything feels urgent and your scarcity instinct kicks in. You now know, that’s setting yourself up for failure. Just 5 minutes the night before helps keep you clear of that trap.

One of the best ways to build Top 3s into your days is by implementing a shut-down routine that you do at the end of your workday. [Get all the specifics about how to design a reliable creative habit here.]

You can put whatever helps you unwind and switch gears into your shut-down routine, but I encourage you to keep it as simple as possible, so you can stick to it more easily. Here’s what I suggest.

1. First, give some love to yourself for all the things you DID do today, even if it’s not what you intended.
   • What did you do today, literally? It’s so easy to forget!
   • How do you feel?
   • What went well? What are you happy with or proud of? Celebrate your successes! Consider a gratitude practice here.
   • What didn’t go so well? Try to consider anything in this category with self-compassion and curiosity.
2. Then, take a quick look at your Top 3 for today and other pending open loops. Is there anything that didn’t get done today that needs rescheduling? Are there new things that popped up that need a place on your calendar (and not just a comfy seat in your Green Room)?
3. Gather any new tasks and ideas that showed up all day, and add them to your Tasks Green Room.
4. Take all of that into consideration as you set your Top 3 for tomorrow.
5. Take a look at your calendar for tomorrow, remind yourself of what you’ve got scheduled, and make sure you schedule time for whatever prep you need to do to feel on top of your game.
6. Assess your capacity available tomorrow, and using that as a guide, set your Top 3 tasks for tomorrow.
7. Finally, shut down all the things. Close tabs, quit apps, close the laptop…Step away from the devices, and enjoy your downtime.

The Daily Top 3 is the entire Creative Engine in miniature

The daily Top 3 practice is more than just a productivity hack. It’s a foundational component of a daily reflection practice that helps you build self-trust, maintain momentum, and set yourself up for success day after day. The Top 3s practice is the entire Creative Engine in miniature.

The Creative Engine is my four-phase framework—Collect, Decide, Act, Reflect—for finishing any self-generated project. The Daily Top 3 runs through that full cycle in just 5 minutes:

• Collect your to dos and tasks
• Decide what’s on your Top 3
• Act on your Top 3: Pay Yourself First with your time
• Reflect: How did that go? Did I scale my Top 3 to the capacity I had available today? If not, how will I do things differently tomorrow?

At all altitudes, from the daily to the career-long, the Creative Engine is a flywheel: cycling through it builds energy and momentum on your work. The beauty of the Daily Top 3 is that it gives you access to that power in just 5 minutes a day.

The daily top three has changed the way I do to-do lists. I used to list all the things I felt like I “should” do, which was always more than I could complete in a day. So I’d end each day having “failed,” which felt terrible and demoralizing.

Having to decide the night before what my three priorities are is useful because (a) it forces me to make a conscious decision about what’s REALLY important, versus what could be done later, (b) I’ve been getting those top three things done most days, which is a real mood booster. And then anything I get done above and beyond that feels like bonus extra credit!

— A CFW alum

Projects are vectors: paths to your creative future

And the way you travel that path is by putting one foot in front of the other: showing up for your work again and again. And the way that happens is by making conscious decisions on a daily basis to focus on what’s most important, and then paying yourself first with your time.

If you take literally nothing else away from anything I write, I want you to make it a regular habit to gather your options for your time, make a conscious decision about what’s most important for tomorrow, and give that most important thing the best of you.

All the rest is gravy.