For Less Anxiety and More Life, Treat Your To-Do List Like a Diner Menu

Several years ago, Cal Newport of Deep Work fame recommended that I read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

The first few chapters hooked me, and I devoured it over 48 hours or so, capturing hundreds of Kindle highlights in the process. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever read, and one of my favorite chapters is titled “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy,” which Oliver graciously permitted me to share on the blog and on the podcast.

In August 2023, Oliver wrote a piece for his newsletter titled “Lists are menus” that stuck with me, and I have thought about it since. You can find it below.

For more Oliver, subscribe to his newsletter here. In case you missed it, also check out his newest Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

Enjoy!

Enter Oliver Burkeman

More and more, I think my issues with conventional productivity advice – indeed, with the very notion of productivity – boil down to this: Spending your days trying to get through a list of things you feel you have to do is a fundamentally joyless and soul-destroying way to live, and most productivity problems, like distraction or procrastination or a lack of motivation, can be understood as internal rebellions against a life spent so dispiritingly. And yet most of what passes for expert advice just involves organizing the list differently, or getting through the list more efficiently. Whereas the real trouble lies in the whole underlying idea of life as a matter of slogging your way through a list.

I realize, of course, that you may not be a “list person” like me, with my long and somewhat ridiculous history of experimenting with lists in notebooks, digital lists, lists organized by context or project or priority, and so on (and so on and so on). But if you adopt a sufficiently broad definition of a to-do list – ie., as any set of things you feel you need to get done – then it’s clear that really, lists are everywhere. Your “to read” pile is a list. A morning routine is a list (of things you think you need to do each morning). That nagging collection of home improvements you keep meaning to get around to? That constitutes a list, too.

Or maybe you’re one of the many people who go through life with a vague sense that there are several important milestones you need to hit before you can truly deem things to be in full working order – to start exercising, find a relationship, work through your childhood issues, sort out your finances? Well, that’s a list, too, in the sense I’m using the word here: a set of tasks you believe you need to get through, in order to feel that everything’s OK.

As every productivity geek knows, there’s a certain pleasure in crossing things off lists. (Some of us have been known to add tasks we’ve already completed, so as to cross those ones off, too.) But in the long run, I don’t think this can make up for the basic joylessness of a life spent doing things in order to have them done – and spent, moreover, in the belief that true peace of mind can only come once they’re all out of the way. Which of course they never are.

All of which leads to a question I’ve found powerful to reflect on: what if we understood our lists as menus instead?

For many years I lived in New York – where, as anyone familiar with the city knows, there’s a kind of diner you can visit at which you’ll be handed a huge menu, bound in fake leather, with perhaps eight or nine laminated pages featuring every imaginable permutation of egg-based dishes, sandwiches, burgers, waffles and salads that the kitchen is capable of conceiving. I love these menus for the sense of crazy abundance they impart. And they help clarify a critical way in which a menu differs from a to-do list: picking just one or two items from a menu is something you get to do, not something you have to do. It’s not a problem that there are so many more things you could order than you’d ever be able to consume in a single visit. It isn’t the case that in an ideal world you’d eat them all, but because you’re not efficient enough at eating you’ve got to settle for just one or two of them, and feel like a failure. That would be ridiculous! The abundance is the point. And the joy is in getting to eat at the restaurant at all.

I take it you can see where this is going when it comes to to-do lists: increasingly, I find myself treating my other lists as menus, too. Your “to read” pile or digital equivalent, for example, is most certainly best understood as a menu – a list of things to pick from, rather than one you have to get through. But the same applies to my list of work projects. Sure, the contents of the menu is constrained by various goals and long-term deadlines. But the daily practice is just to pick something appetizing from the menu, instead of grinding through a list. 

Maybe it’ll come as no surprise to learn I’ve been getting more done this way, too – not least because I’m harnessing the energy of what I feel like doing, rather than suppressing it in order to push onwards through a list.

And here’s the kicker: aren’t all to-do lists really menus anyway, whether I choose to think of them that way or not? After all, if there are vastly more things I could do with any given hour or day than I actually can do – if there are a million ways to build a business, to be a better parent, spouse or citizen, live healthily, and so on, yet only time for a handful of them – then in fact we’re always picking from a menu, even if we delude ourselves that what we’re doing is getting through a list.

One great benefit of doing this more consciously – of facing up to the fact that lists are menus – is that it shifts the source of gratification. The reward of pleasure in your work, or a sense of meaning, no longer gets doled out stingily, in morsels, en route to some hypothetical moment of future fulfillment when the list is complete and you can finally feel fully satisfied. Instead, the real reward comes from getting to pick something from the menu – from getting to dive in to one of the vast range of possibilities the world has to offer, without any expectation of getting through them all, just like the pleasure of sitting down to a good meal. Which means you get to have the reward right now.

Oliver Burkeman is the New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) and Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts (2024). He lives in Yorkshire in England. 

Copyright 2023 by Oliver Burkeman. Reprinted with permission.