If your to-do list terrifies you, the problem isn’t motivation—it’s the system. An endless list creates stress, drains focus, and makes everything feel urgent. Today, April Shprintz shares a simple, psychology-backed method—featured in Taming the Molecule of More—that turns an overwhelming to-do list into a clear, manageable plan. By cutting unnecessary tasks and limiting what you do each day, you’ll feel calmer, more focused, and reclaim 2–4 hours a week lost to worry. Fix your to-do list, and everything else gets easier.
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To Do List Terrifying You? Do This!
I am so glad you’re here. I have news. I’m in a book. I can’t imagine. Not my book, but a book that someone else wrote, where something I helped them with helped so much, it actually made it into a how-to book. I’m actually really excited about this. I’m excited about the reminder that I can help you with something that really tends to bog people down who are organized and sometimes just terrifies the hell out of them. Your to-do list. It may seem like a small thing, but it can actually change your life.
The individual who wrote about this process was a client of mine. His name is Michael Long. He wrote two really fantastic books. He co-wrote The Molecule of More, all about dopamine and how it works in our brains. He wrote a follow-up how-to book called Taming the Molecule of More. If you want to hear this in his words, I think it’s on about page 157 where he starts talking about it. He does it really quickly, probably more quickly than I’m going to describe it. When I helped him with it, he had a to-do list that was thirteen Microsoft Word pages long.
Using The Eisenhower Matrix To Organize Your To-Do List
I said, “We’ve got to handle this for you.” The first part of this process is to take your to-do list in whatever form you have, and I want you to rate these tasks that you have, and you can use the Eisenhower matrix to do this. I find that a really easy way. Don’t worry, you can look it up. It’s everywhere. It’s super easy. You’re dividing all those tasks into quadrants. Some of those tasks are going to be important, and they’re urgent. You’re going to do those right away.
Your to-do list may seem like a small thing, but it can actually change your life. Share on XSome of them are going to be important but not urgent. You’ll just schedule those on a calendar, and I’ll get to the best way to do that. The third type would be they’re not important, and they’re not urgent. Delegate those to someone else. Someone else can handle that for you. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Limiting Daily Tasks And Scheduling For Manageability
My absolute favorite are the ones that are not important and not urgent. Just cross those out. You’re never going to do them. You don’t need to do them. They don’t matter. Just doing this part of the exercise is going to give you immense relief. The second part. Here’s what I do. You can use whatever form of scheduling that you like. I love my Google Calendar, and I love the task function.
What I do is limit myself to 3 or 4 tasks per day. Those are going to be my do it today or schedule a time to do it type tasks. The great thing about using tasks in Google Calendar is that you can move them. If I don’t get to it today, it will automatically go tomorrow, and I don’t have to worry about it. If I get really productive one day and I do all my tasks today, I can go do future tasks if I want to. The point of this is that you get the dopamine hits and the good feeling that you get from accomplishing your to-do list.
Also, you’re not always looking at the whole thing, beating yourself up for not doing it. You get to do it in little chunks, which are really manageable. You feel good, and you don’t feel overwhelmed. You know it’s on there, and you schedule them based on when they’re due because a lot of times we tend to look at our to-do list like we have to do all that stuff right now. No, we don’t. If you’ve got to do something for taxes, then that’s not due until tax day. That’s April 15th.
Any time between now and then you’re good. Most everything you have has a suspense to it or a due date. If it doesn’t, then it’s not urgent. You can just schedule it for whenever it feels good. I want you to try this because number one, you’re going to eliminate a bunch of tasks. I think Mike got rid of, I don’t know, 3 or 4 pages that he was like, “I’m never going to do that. I just had this idea once, and then I decided it didn’t feel good anymore, so I let it go.”
That’s gonna be huge. Number two, the time you will save by not worrying about, did I remember that? Am I doing that? Worrying about whether I should I double check this, etc., because you know you have it in your process, is also going to be huge. That saves most of my clients around two hours or if you’re someone who really worries about a lot of things, up to four hours a week. I’m not kidding. Try this process out. More importantly, let me know what you did with the time that you got back from not living in terror of your to-do list. Here’s to your success.
