Every morning when I wake up, there’s a list of a thousand things to do running through my head. It divides itself with things I need to do, things I want to do, things that I’ve been putting off and back-burner projects I’d like to finish.

The problem is there’s enough in the “things I need to do” list that will last another lifetime or three. It can get overwhelming to the point where no matter how much I accomplished during the day, it never feels like enough.

With the never ending systems out there, many of which include motivational boosts to encourage task completion, the problem always feels like a mismanagement of time.

Yes, that can be the case, but mindset is an even bigger problem.

A thousand things cannot be done in a day.
They can barely be done in a year.

Being defined by level of “busy-ness” is also a meaningless trophy whose only prize is regret.

To ease into a mindset that feels less overwhelming, it pays to heed a lesson from Warren Buffet:

When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”
He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

Take that level of thinking to life: if there were only 20 punches that could be made for an entire lifetime, what would they be?

The thousand things to do would suddenly shrink tremendously and adding any others would require some very careful deliberation.

Every time I get off track, I’m reminded of this lesson.