It’s okay to not do things
This month’s Todoist newsletter was about not doing things. That might seem an odd thing for a todo list manager to promote, but here we are. Naomi, the human behind the newsletter, wrote
The only thing more liberating than checking something off is deciding that you don’t actually have to do it in the first place. Press that sacred delete button, and thank me later. 😌
You see, when you’re in the (good) habit of recording every single task or reminder that pops into your head, your task list can end up pretty full. And this is exactly what we want because now you have a clear mind and can look at all of your tasks objectively.
However, sometimes we get attached to those tasks and put pressure on ourselves to do every single thing that ever crossed our minds or graced our task list.
Rarely have I felt so called out by a newsletter. But it’s true: sometimes you just can’t do all of the things. That’s okay. Last week, I was really busy. I was physically and mentally tired and I decided that writing a new post for Duck Alignment Academy could wait. I like to keep to my regular Wednesday publication cadence, if for no other reason than to become universally adored and sell more books. But if I’m being honest with myself, there’s no real harm in skipping a week when I need to. None of you even said anything!
As much as we might hate to admit it to ourselves, this rule applies to our project’s processes and schedule tasks. They’re all there for a reason, and it’s good if all of the tasks get done. But not all of them are critical and sometimes they have to happen late or not at all. The key is to understand which tasks are critical and which aren’t.
As a general rule, the broader the impact or harder to reverse the effect of skipping a task, the more likely it is that you need to consider it critical. Skipping the release notes on a major version release might make it difficult for users to upgrade. Skipping the blog post on a patch release doesn’t hurt much. A month delay in removing inactive committers probably doesn’t do much harm, but a month delay in granting privileges to a new committer means they can’t fully contribute.
Some tasks get more critical the more they’re skipped. Skipping the inactive committer cleanup for one release cycle is probably fine. Skipping it for several means you have a lot of vectors for an account takeover attack. But if you find a task getting skipped every time with no ill effects, it might be time to reconsider if it’s necessary to have it on the list at all.
This post’s featured photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash.