The 5-2 Focus List (A Useful To-Do List Alternative)

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad.

The 5-2

The process goes like this:

Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc.

Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then:

• If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list. 
• If you finish a task, just cross it off.

Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end and repeat this process for the rest of the day. 

Foster argues that five is the optimal starting length because it’s just long enough to pull your forward, without feeling like you can achieve everything without putting in effort. 

The structure of the list means you’re often making small amounts of progress at a regular interval, rather than doing long stretches of work at once, so it’s both less intimidating to start and more likely to accumulate more work than you would have done. 

IN PRACTICE

For those who don’t want to read my scribble in the photograph above, here’s what that looked like on 19 June.

I started the day with five tasks, pulled from my master-list of projects and tasks on Asana:

• Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
• Write 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
• Do my quarterly checkpoint
• Clear the dishes
• Clean and reorganise my desk

In my first cycle, I finished writing 250 words and cleared all the dishes, but merely made progress on the other three tasks. As I finished work, they got added to the end of the list (And while I list 250 words, the actual goal on my asana is “write 750 words”, and so it’s actually a thing I repeat three times).

Ergo, my “round two” list features four repeats, and one new action: 

• Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
• Write another 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
• Do my quarterly checkpoint
• Clean and reorganise my desk
• Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damaged.

This time around, I crushed it—I finished my reading, the writing goal, and my checkpoint with no need for a third entry, so as I hit cleaning the desk and fixing the door, I got to add another three targets: 

• Clean and reorganise my desk
• Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damage
• Draft a “would you like to do the introduction to this collection” letter that was causing me some serious anxiety
• Print the manuscript I have to do a cover synopsis for and proof this week
• Write another 250 words

This time around, I not only finished everything, but I overshot on some (reorganising my desk also led to experimenting my webcam set-up, so my spouse doesn’t risk walking into shot; writing the letter that was causing me anxiety quickly became proofing and sending it).

I would have done another five, but I was heading out to dinner with my sister at the end of the day, so I settled for one last entry before signing out. 

That might not seem like a lot for a Sunday, but lots of those were several-hours long jobs. Cleaning the desk means literally pulling everything off and wiping it down with antiseptic wipes, and I read about 75% of the book in one day. Even the writing, which basically involved hitting my average daily word count, was breaking a month-log failure to work on creative projects. Ordinarily, I’d have celebrated getting one of these done on a Sunday.

And it’s not like these are all I did in the day—they were just the focus. I squeezed little things in around the edges, like prepping today’s Facebook posts, and did a couple of “task of opportunity” jobs when I was stuck on how to progress.