Not too long ago I heard Seth Godin say something like “we don’t want this to become the black hole of tasks for you”.

That image is quite powerful when starting to think about how we organize ourselves.

In a day we easily find quite a few things to add to our to-do list.

The article we want to read, the meeting we promise to organize, the cards we need to buy, the call we want to make, … it’s building itself up along the day as we want to help others, make sure everything is handled or forget to say no.

It can also build itself up as we are working on our project and see more and more details to be done, worth doing, seemingly important.

Then, one day what happens, is that we start to run to get them all done.

That’s the day when our focus has switched from the project we want to make happen to a graveyard of tasks which need to be checked. It’s the day when work becomes a burden. It’s the day we forget to ask ourselves if the next task is still worth doing. It’s the moment we’ve lost sight of what we actually were building.