When the Wright brothers started out, they had a bicycle shop and no intention of building airplanes. They were tinkerers, not engineers. They had no grand plan. They went from bicycle sales and repairs to flying the first manned, powered flight. How? They had far less money than their competition. One of the brothers hadn't even finished high school!
The Wright brothers were doers, tinkerers, people who preferred action over long term plans. They'd draw out a design and then go test it. They hired a local mechanic to build the engine. They flew the plane themselves. Other well funded inventors hired engineers and professional pilots. The Wright brothers had no grand plan, just a grand idea, brains, and work ethic.
Do.List has no calendar because a calendar has no business in an app about getting things done. Calendars are for appointments and meetings, not small tasks and not big goals.
Many Do.List users just use the app for managing life, not big projects, and they love the app. It works for them because focusing on doing is as essential for daily to-dos as it is for big projects.
Being that person that just gets stuff done has nothing to do with planning exactly when it will be done. It's about knowing what you want to do and making sure that you do it as soon as you can. If life gets in the way today, do it first thing tomorrow.
How many inventors and millionaire entrepreneurs have you seen who scheduled their way to success? More often, they simply started working and never stopped. On the other hand, how many people make grand plans and never do them? They set long term goals and never make it past the first few steps.
Planning gives people a false sense of security. For many, it's a procrastination tool. With the plan in place, they feel less anxiety about the task at hand. If the only thing you knew about two people was that one makes lots of plans and one is constantly working, which would you bet on to make more progress? I'd bet on the doer, not the planner.
Elon Musk, the Tesla & SpaceX CEO, is notorious for missing deadlines! Yet, he's launching rockets into orbit and landing them again. His cars drive themselves, have incredible safety ratings, futuristic interiors, and can drive for hundreds of miles without a drop of gasoline. He's building the largest factory in the world. He misses deadlines all the time.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has missed at least five big deadlines a year for five years straight now. Even worse, literally half of the time he missed them by a full year. So why is he so successful?
Tesla stock price
You can plan to do that task at 7pm on Wednesday but life will likely get in the way. What matters is, when you're finally free at 11pm will you stay up and get that task done? Or wake up an hour early the next morning and do it? You don't need a calendar to help. You need a prioritized list and the drive to do it.
If you intend to get something done at 8:00 AM and something gets in the way, will you forfeit your lunch break to get it done? Will you forfeit watching your favorite show to work on that blog post, that crafting project, to run that errand, to work on that start-up?
There's a widespread misunderstanding about where productivity comes from. Too many people draw their strategy for their personal lives from their work lives. Scheduling a 10:00 AM meeting or a three o'clock Friday deadline helps at work. Why not for their personal life?
Yet working late to meet our work deadlines is often the thing that get in the way of our personal deadlines. Jobs, family, traffic, unexpected home repairs, they all break our personal deadlines.
So unless you've had previous success with scheduling tasks, start using your calendar for only appointments and meetings. Make a list and look at it 50 times a day. Stay focused on it. The prerequisites for productivity are not timeliness or rigidity. Instead, embrace tenacity, energy, persistence, and focus.
