Detox your to-do list with AI

- I'm going to let you in on a little secret. It shouldn't really be a secret, but very few people know about this, for some reason. Surveys show that people in their '60s didn't feel as much time pressure as we do today. They had less time objectively, but didn't complain about not having enough of it. Why is that? Well, there's many theories, but one from economics is simply that our life expectancy has not dramatically changed. Sure, maybe we live a few more years, but not decades more so we still have more or less the same amount of time as back then, and a lot, and I really mean a lot more things we can do with our time. People in the '60s didn't have Netflix, Amazon, cheap air travel, coffee shops on every street corner, yoga studios, gaming consoles, social media, endless online courses or weekend getaways to choose from. In other words, there's so much more we can do, but just as much time. So, of course we feel like we don't have enough time because we can't do everything that we could possibly do today. The same thing happens at work and in our personal life. We accumulate tasks and projects because there's so much that we can do. And we are rarely aware of how much time we actually have, and there's a powerful but sometimes painful solution. Divest, drop anything that is not a top priority. Years ago, I would do this by going somewhere quiet with a notebook and pen and list my projects and ruthlessly eliminate anything that is no longer super important to me. But again, it's painful. Our emotional investment is sometimes too strong. That's why AI is amazing here. It doesn't have the biases and emotional investment that stand between us and our goals. Let me show you exactly how to do this. Here's a prompt you can use. I need help evaluating my current projects and commitments. I will list them and I'd like you to help me identify which ones to potentially eliminate. For each one, please analyze one, alignment with my stated goals. Two, current resource cost. Three, opportunity cost. And four, suggest a low friction way to eliminate it if needed. Here are my projects. First, mentoring three junior employees. Two, running the monthly team building events. Three, contributing to the company newsletter. Four, managing our team's social media presence. Five, developing a new project management framework. See how the AI not only identifies what to eliminate, but also provides practical, low-friction ways to disengage. Try this right after a session. List all of your current projects and commitments. Then use this prompt to get an objective evaluation. Remember to include exit strategies in your prompt. That's crucial for actually following through. The goal is not to eliminate everything, but to create space for what truly matters. And sometimes we need an objective partner to help us see what that is.