When the list is long, the heavy part is not doing the things: it is choosing them, and the choice comes back at every line. Empty your head, take one single thing, and give it an hour.
David Allen, in a 2001 book, starts from a simple idea: your head is for having ideas, not for holding them. As long as something lives only in your mind, it comes back at irregular intervals, and each return takes a small piece of attention with it. His proposal is to dump everything out, into a place you trust.
Stephen Covey, in a 1989 book, adds the second cut: not everything urgent is important, and almost nothing important is urgent. That is why the list fills with small things that shout, while the big one stays at the bottom, quiet.
Put together, the two ideas say one thing: emptying and choosing are two different jobs, and doing them at the same moment is why you never get going.
The third step is usually the missing one. A tidy list is still a list: it holds every decision, all of them still to be made. An hour holds one decision, already made, and it has the advantage of arriving on its own.
At that hour, if someone else booked the same slot, you are on a video call and each of you works on your own thing: two minutes to say what you will do, then silence, and two minutes at the end to say how it went.
If the problem is not the length of the list but simply getting going, our page on not feeling like starting looks at the same wall from the other side.
You can switch: the appointment is with the hour, not with the task. What counts is that at that hour you are sitting there.
The ones you know you can keep. One slot kept leaves more work done than four skipped, and none of the aftertaste of having missed something.
Yes, but it takes a minute: your email, a code arrives, and it is free with no credit card.
The ideas are summarised, not quoted, and credited to the people who wrote them. No text is taken from the books.