He makes the list in the car. On the drive to the office, the owner works out what he wants to get done that day, and by the time he parks he has it. Then he walks in the door and somebody tells him, “There have been a lot of changes since last night. One employee called in sick, another employee can’t get the job done to meet the deadline they promised the client, and, by the way, here are four messages from four unhappy clients that need to talk to you right away.”
The list from the car doesn’t get touched. He starts on it at 1 or 2 in the afternoon. At 5 he is watching his people head out the door while he thinks up a reason to call home and say he’ll be late for dinner. I call this owner Mr. Overwhelm, and that scene is how I define overwhelm: busy, distracted by the day-to-day, and passionate about micromanaging.
The usual advice for this owner is a better system for the list: start earlier, block the calendar, protect the morning. I understand the instinct, but I think the list is doing the wrong job. A list written in the car is a plan for a day that someone else is about to rewrite. A list written the night before has a different job, and I think it is the more valuable one.
At 5 pm they’re watching the employees vacate the office while thinking of a reason to call their spouse and tell them they’re going to be home late for dinner that night.
— Gary B. Henson, Founder
The evidence behind that is small and specific. Researchers at Baylor University (opens in new tab), led by Michael Scullin, asked what happens to sleep when people write about their tasks at bedtime. Fifty-seven university students, aged 18 to 30, spent a night in a sleep lab with technology and homework off limits and lights out at 10:30. Five minutes before that, they were randomly split in two. Half wrote a list of what they needed to do the next day and the days after. The other half wrote about what they had already finished. The team measured sleep with brain-wave monitoring, and the British Psychological Society’s summary (opens in new tab) of the study put the average time to fall asleep at about 15 minutes for the to-do group and about 25 for the group writing about finished work.
The details are worth a second look. The researchers reported that the more specific the to-do list, the faster people tended to fall asleep, while the more detail people gave about completed tasks, the longer they took to drop off. Scullin described the starting point this way, as Medical News Today (opens in new tab) reported it: “Most people just cycle through their to-do lists in their heads.” The question was whether writing the list down could stop the cycling.
I want to be careful about how much weight this carries. It was 57 people, all young and healthy, for one night in a lab. Scullin said himself, “We recruited healthy young adults, and so we don’t know whether our findings would generalize to patients with insomnia.” The study had no group that wrote nothing, so the British Psychological Society’s summary notes that it can’t separate a benefit from the to-do list from a slowdown caused by writing about finished work. The researchers called for a longer trial outside the lab. And nothing in it tests business owners, or whether the next day goes any better.
faster to fall asleep, on average, for young adults who wrote a bedtime to-do list than for those who wrote about finished tasks (about 15 minutes versus 25, in a 57-person lab study). British Psychological Society Research Digest, on Scullin et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2018) →
My interpretation goes a step past the study, and I’ll say so. Mr. Overwhelm carries the whole business around in his head, into the car and to the dinner table and probably into bed, and a list on paper at the end of the day is a cheap way to put some of it down. It also changes what the list is for. The night-before list will not survive the morning. Much of it will be overwritten by the sick call and the four messages, and that is fine, because its job was to get tomorrow out of your head tonight.
Here is what I would ask you to try. Before you leave, spend five minutes writing what you expect to face tomorrow, specific enough that you could hand it to someone: the customer you owe a call, the decision somebody is waiting on, the deadline an employee already told you is at risk. Then stop. Skip the sorting and the color-coding, and leave off the things you would like to get to someday.
Then look at what keeps getting rewritten by 9 in the morning. If the same kinds of problems land on your desk every day, you’re working in the business when you should be working on it, and no list will change that. Those problems need a person other than the owner whose job is to take them first, which is the structure we build into the Inside-Out Method™. If it’s the loneliness of being the person everything falls to that’s wearing you down, my piece on who you are when the business doesn’t need you is the better place to start.
Give it five minutes tonight, before you lock up. Tomorrow, notice what time you start on your own list.
