Everyone makes to-do lists. They’re helpful for keeping us focused and on track.
But what if they are focusing us on the wrong things?
When I think about to-do lists, I think about “TASKS” - stuff that needs to get done - things that I can put a big red line through and mark as “completed.”
It feels like a productive day if I’m hunched over my computer, clearing out my inbox, editingn blog posts, and banging out projects one after the other.
But won’t there be another list tomorrow?
I once overheard a sobering comment, “When you die, there will still be emails in your inbox.”
I regularly speak to audiences at conferences and events around the country and I talk about the magic of human connection. Through stories, science, humor, and a little magic, I help the event participants to stop and consider the value of developing and maintaining deep, meaningful relationships - even (and perhaps ESPECIALLY) in our modern digital world.
NOBODY has ever come up to me after my talk to argue that tasks are more important than relationships.
EVERYONE pays lip service to the fact that people are important and a top priority.
And then their phone dings and they get sucked right back into being “too busy.”
Let’s not be THAT person.
The problem with how people try to be productive is that they’re too focused on accomplishing tasks, but the real way to have a productive day, is to create daily opportunities to nurture relationships. Instead of only writing out a to-do list, try adding a to-who list.
Instead of a list of tasks, a “to-who” list is a list of names.
Who do you need to check in with today?
Who do you need to thank?
What relationship do you need to make a positive deposit into?
Who could use a random act of kindness?
Who haven’t you seen in a while that you could brunch with this week?
Write down four or five names and then follow through.
I get it. Dropping someone a note “just to say hi” doesn’t feel very productive. But that’s the thing about relationships. You can’t mass-produce them. They don’t scale. They each require their own special kind of manual labor to maintain.
And you will never be able to check them off as “completed.”
But it’s little things like doing a to-who list that make the difference between SAYING that you value the people on your team and actually VALUING them.
It’s the difference between being an organization that people want to work for versus a place that puts “we value our people” somewhere in the mission statement, hidden away on some back page of the company web site.
Take the 15-Day “To-Who List” Challenge
I challenge you to try writing a to-who list every workday for three weeks.
Each time you write a to-do list, also write a “to-who” list. Some names can repeat, or you can come up with new names every time. Scroll through your Facebook or LinkedIn contacts if you need ideas for who to connect with. You’ve already got the seeds of human connection in place. Now it’s time to throw some water on them.
You’d have to do some mental gymnastics to imagine anything BAD coming from this. But it isn’t difficult to see how this challenge could pay off for you in a big way. Nurtured relationships bear the best kind of fruit that life (and business) has to offer.
Why not start right now? Make a to-who list and start nurturing those relationships.