Creating The Anti To-Do List

One of the most startling realizations of my adult life, of my entrepreneurial career, has been that the people who are furthest ahead of us in the game, the most successful amongst us, it’s not often that they’re doing something we’re not doing. It’s more often the reason they are where they are is because they are not doing something that we are doing. It’s the systematic elimination of the activities in our life that are holding us back more than it is the implementation of activities that would accelerate us. So this is what I call subtraction through addition. I’m sorry, let’s try that again as addition through subtraction. So where we take away things, and in taking it away, in the removal of that thing, we actually increase our speed towards our goals. The simplest analogy of this would be to take off the emergency brake. If you’re driving around with the emergency brake engaged, it doesn’t really matter how hard you push on the accelerator, right? You’re still going to be grinding, you’re still going to be burning through the brakes, and it’s going to be holding you back.

As soon as you. Instead of focusing on doing more, instead of you just disengage that emergency brake, you would unleash incredible amounts of speed and productivity and efficiency in the direction of your goal. And so we should focus our time and attention, sometimes more, on eliminating things from our life than it is the addition of new activities, new habits, new routines, new systems. Right. And what I want to encourage you to think about today is the anti to do list. The anti to do list. What are the things that you’re currently doing that you knew if you were to stop, you would. You would make progress towards your goals.

You would accelerate in the direction of your dreams. For me, there were three things in particular. I identified in the last two years that if I could get those, if I could reduce those in my own life, I would make meaningful progress. I want to share those with you in hopes that they maybe spark some ideas for you. The first thing I had to eliminate was chess. So this is another way to think about this is video games. For me, chess was just another video game. I could hide behind it as an intellectual pursuit because I have big, audacious competitive goals within chess.

But the way I was playing and engaging with it was more of a dissociation technique, an escape from my reality. And I was finding that I would pour hours of time and brainpower into chess every single day. That wasn’t necessarily improving my chess skills, it wasn’t moving me towards my chess goals. And it was certainly pulling me away from mentally engaging fully with all the other things in my life that I had. Goals around. My businesses, for instance. Right. So I set up a system where I could no longer play online chess, except for during very specific times of day and under very regimented structures.
As a result, I stopped playing chess. So, Willy nilly, I started playing with more intention during the times when I was allowed to play. And the other areas of my life that were suffering before because I was pouring so much into chest. Now I had freed up that mental bandwidth, and they started to move toward my goals much quicker. So what is that thing in your life? Is there a game? Is there an activity? Is there, like, games on your phone, games on your iPad, Netflix, whatever it is? What is the thing that you’re like, I’m putting too much time and energy into this stupid thing right now. It’s not helping me. It could be social media, right? The next thing that I eliminated from my life was alcohol. I stopped drinking.
That was about a year and a half ago, has had massive effects on my life, because instead of thinking about going out to the bar and having drinks or, like, spending money at the grocery store and getting a drink and then having a drink at dinner and all these things getting the empty calories that then make me feel like shit, that impede my sleep, that then impede my workout the next day, I just cut that out entirely. I didn’t waste any more mental bandwidth on it. Now I just drink bubbly water or whatever, you know, I drink my monster, I drink my. My salty bubbly water from element. Gives me all the same things that I wanted from the alcohol, but with none of the downsides. The third thing that had a massive impact on my life has been to set a regular sleep bedtime alarm. Rather than worrying about when I wake up, I just focus more on when I go to bed. And that has had a massive improvement on the quality of my sleep, the rhythm of my sleep.

And it hasn’t been about adding something new. It’s been about eliminating and saying, I’m not going to stay up past 10:00 p.m. i’m going to be in bed at this specific time, and I’m going to go through this routine because it’s important to me, and I know that the downstream effects of this are going to be massive. So just what are the three things in your life? What is that anti to do list if you were to create it? We all have our own little foibles the things that are kind of taking us away from our goals and are distracting us and we know what those are for you. You probably don’t have to think very deep if you’re like, what are the three things if I was to eliminate from my life would have the most impact on moving me towards my goals? What are those three things? That is your anti to do list. Write them down. And then every morning until you break these habits, I want you to be thinking about, how can I eliminate this? How can I future cast? Because future you is very sneaky. Will find ways to go back to doing those activities.

So you need to, while you have the willpower, the discipline, create structures and systems and routines to eliminate it and say, okay, when this happens, when I’m feeling the inclination to go and do this activity like I know I will, then here’s what I will do instead. Here’s how I will make it harder for myself. Here’s how I’ll gatekeep my future me’s attention. And then every day, keep refining that system until you’re able to systematically eliminate those three things from your life that you know, if you got out, you would move forward faster. Do that for the next quarter. Tell me that that doesn’t have a massive effect on the quality of your life and the results that you’re seeing. I challenge you. I challenge you to do that for 90 days and then come back here and tell me it didn’t work.

I promise you will unlock incredible, incredible, unbelievable levels of growth. So go do that. Go create your anti to do list. I’ll catch you back here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper, folks. My friends.