I am often busy.

Sometimes it’s the bad busy, disorganized and wasting my time on nonsense tasks. But typically I’m just busy. I balance a day job, a small business, and several other side projects and hobbies.

I do a lot.

The problem is that when I reflect on time spent, I often don’t feel that I’ve accomplished anything.

With a writing or web design project, for example, I might spend hours typing lines of words or code without making any significant, noticeable progress. Though I might have accomplished a lot, I don’t see such a change on the page.

The same can be said for the other small tasks I do on any given day. Like the baby steps of progress, the results are rarely seen until much later.

My to-do list for the longest time has been digital. This is great for convenience. But what I’ve recently realized, is that it’s a little too convenient.

Rather than crossing out a completed task, I delete it. A quick hit of dopamine as I remove the task from my list, and it’s gone.

This is all well and good as I move through the list, but at the end of a stretch of work days, I often forget what I did. I look back at the time I spent, and maybe pick out a few of the more significant wins, but fail to recall the small ones.

So while I slowly move some of these tasks to an analog system, I’ve started making a done list.

This is exactly how it sounds. When a task is complete, rather than deleting it, I move it to a separate list. And when the work days, are done, I can look back at every little task that I completed. From the quick email response or minor code fix to the article published, I have a physical reminder.

And when my negative self-talk mind tries to convince me otherwise, I can see that I did not, in fact, waste my precious time.