March 22nd, 2020
Want to get something done 10x faster?

What's the hack?

I don't do it. Remove it from my todo list completely.

If it keeps hanging out on my todo list, then it's probably not that important.

Removing it from my todo list just made me 10x more productive.

(Note - I'm not saying I'm an expert at this - but I'm trying to get better at it.)

An example

This daily journal app you're reading right now. I want to open source it. It's been on my todo list for a while.

I started working on it today. It was about 1-2 hours of work...

Then, I started thinking...

  • "Wait, I have to pull out all of my crappy code."
  • "I need to squash all my commits to hide the passwords I hardcoded."
  • "Wait, what is going to come out of making this open source?"
  • "Once I launch this, it will require upkeep."
  • "People will be submitting issues for the stupidest things, and PRs that I will receive emails about."
  • "What is the benefit of this? To get some stars on Github?"

So I deleted the entire project off of my todo list.

I just saved myself 200 hours.