I’m not sure where I first read about How To Do Things or why I decided to buy it, but I saw it sitting in my “Downloads” folder when I was on a plane without WiFi and opened it up. It was a pretty short, pretty simple self help booklet, but it made an impact on me.

At its core it’s a simplified pomodoro method with a key insight for people who’ve gotten by with hyperfocus for most of their career: you don’t need that much concentrated time to make real progress on your to-do list. Focus on checking off one thing at a time, center the feeling of completion rather than the slog of doing some undesirable work itself.

For some, this might be obvious or self-explanatory. For me it really resonated, and I’ve felt a lot more confident relying on my to-do list since I finished reading.