Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t

No wonder we get so paralyzed! Instead of putting tasks on a list, you do “time blocking,” putting every task in your calendar as a chunk of work. “I think it is pretty undeniable that time blocking, done well, is going to blow the list method out of the water,” Newport tells me. “We’ll not only tell you when tasks are overdue, we’ll tell you that tasks are going to be overdue,” says Patrick Lightbody, Reclaim’s cofounder. Paper forces you to repetitively rewrite tasks, as when, say, you transfer all last week’s undone to-dos to this week’s list, or when you erase and rewrite calendar events.