TJL #26: Use a checkbox (Daily Productivity #1)
Simple tips & trick to be more productive
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #26. In this newsletter I share the best of what others have figured out already. To get the full TJL experience, subscribe today.
Today’s TJL is on how to be more productive, using a simple checkbox.
An ode to the checkbox
Everyone knows that todo lists are good for productivity. One thing that I found to really enhance my todo lists are checkboxes.
In his book, Every Tool’s a Hammer, Adam Savage has a whole chapter dedicated to checkboxes. Savage worked as a model maker on Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, where his list making “took a quantum leap” when he discovered the checkbox. Here’s what Adam has to say about checkboxes:
The power and importance of the checkbox for me simply cannot be overstated. On the one hand, it speaks, as I’ve said, to the completist in me. The best part of making a list is, you guessed it, crossing things off.
Checkboxes are simple yet powerful. Checking a checkbox is so satisfying that we automatically want to do more of it.
But when you physically cross them out, like with a pen, you can make them harder to read, which destroys their informational value beyond that single project and, to me at least, makes the whole thing feel incomplete.
The checkbox allowed me to cross something off my list, to see clearly that I’d crossed it off, and at the same time retain all its information while not also adding to the cognitive load of interpreting the list.
Yet they provide additional benefits over regular todo lists where you cross things out.
The checkbox can also describe the project’s momentum. And momentum is key to finishing anything.
Momentum isn’t just physical, though. It’s mental, and for me it’s also emotional. I gain so much energy from staring at a bunch of colored-in checkboxes on the left side of a list, that I’ve been known to add things I’ve already done to a list, just to have more checkboxes that are dark than are empty.
That sense of forward progress keeps me enthusiastically plugging away at rudimentary, monotonous tasks as well as huge projects that seem like they might never end.
Most importantly, the checkbox provides physical, mental, and emotional momentum, the key to finishing anything. Checkboxes are crack. Or magic. Your pick.
Application
How apply this to your own life?
Try this: Instead of making a todo list for your tasks, make a todo list with checkboxes.
What I sometimes even do is make a task called “check this checkbox” and then tick it off. Yes, really. Is it silly? Yes. Does it put me in the mood to do more? Yes!
Checkboxes work. Use them.
Previous TJLs
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