Note: This is about Nestful, a list-taking app, but the principles can be applied anywhere. Please take it with you to the tool you’re using!
I often hear being overwhelmed is a major roadblock to productivity, but it shouldn’t be that way. In fact — it’s easy to avoid.
To understand the solution, we first must understand the problem. While seemingly straightforward, there’s a nuance we must take to heart:
We can be overwhelmed by the length of a list and the perceived size of an item.
Therefore we need to solve both for a list with a large number of small items and a list with one huge item.
The latter is easier, so let’s start there.
Divide and Conquer
Any single task you find overwhelming is divisible into smaller tasks.
That is a law of nature that is eternally true. Why it is true is a tale for another day. Do email me if you’re interested.
If you ever happen onto a task that you find indivisible, you must check your premises. Any violation of the law above cannot exist. The case of the unknown is the easiest to split, as the first subtask will be to figure out how split to the seemingly indivisible task. That subtask is also divisible.
Nestful is meant for such usage and excels at it. To illustrate this, let’s look at how I learned Japanese.
First, I had this language learning list:
That’s not very useful as “Japanese” is hardly an innocent, small task. Splitting was due.
I learn mostly through content consumption, but this item was strictly for the “chores” part of learning. Here’s how it looked after I divided Japanese into subtasks:
But reading 8 books is also not a very consumable task. So we nest deeper:
This is more like it. For me, the size of these items is not overwhelming. If you still find them too large, remember: any task you find overwhelming is splittable into smaller tasks. Even if you don’t know the books, you’ll have a task to find the books. And if you don’t know how to look for them, you’ll have a task to ask a friend or learn how to use Google.
Eventually, you are going to reach a small enough task.
But now we have a lot of small tasks, which can cause the exact same symptoms. This is where Spontaneuous Productivity comes in.
Creation Offload
If you’ve used Nestful before, you know that in addition to the regular views in the above screenshots (list, kanban, etc), there’s also a special one called agenda.
Agenda view has a special trick up its sleeve: it will “bubble up” due items, even if they are nested deep inside your task tree:
The above screenshots show part of my home page, set to the agenda display, showing the due item “JPDB”, even though that item is inside “Japanese”, which is in turn inside “Languages”.
This is the secret to not being overwhelmed by the quantity. The length of the list is only overwhelming if you have to deal with the entire list. That is because having to deal with a big list as a list, is basically the same as dealing with a large item.
What we did here is we offloaded the mental load to the list’s creation by dividing it into doable tasks and setting a due date where needed. This means that now, even if the list is huge (and mine is), you don’t have to care — just do the thing at the top.
Even if you suck at creating a good list (and you probably will, at the beginning), it’s still going to work just fine. Editing a list built with such intent is a breeze, mostly just moving things around when priorities change.
If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, read our essay on Spontaneous Productivity.
That’s it!
The best solutions are the simplest solutions, since those are the ones we are most likely to do.
Sometimes, though, there aren’t simple solutions, so just split the problem.
If you found it useful, please consider supporting by giving Nestful a try and sharing this essay.