The Buffet 2-List

The Buffet 2-list is the most important productivity tool I use. It helped me to address procrastination more than anything else I tried. And I struggled with procrastination my whole life. In the last years it mostly showed as an inability to focus. I felt there's so much to do, and I had wasted so much of my time already. I wanted to do everything at once, but ended up doing nothing. This created a sense of urgency bordering on panic.

If you've read any stoic philosophy, you will have encountered the advice to cultivate a sense of urgency in your life. This urgency is about becoming aware of the fact that tomorrow isn't guaranteed. That you and everyone you love will die. Implemented correctly, it will move you to act, have the uncomfortable but necessary conversations, and drive you to make the hard decisions you're struggling with. But it has nothing to do with what I felt.

Achieving anything meaningful requires time, focus, and a lot of effort. If you work on too many things at the same time, you might feel busy but you won't make any progress. The panic I felt lead me to this busyness. So before I could address how I'm spending my time, I had to learn how to deal with this reactive urgency.

This is where the Buffet 2-List helped me. Originally created by Warren Buffet, it consists of two simple steps. First, create a list of the 25 things you want to do most in your life. Next, highlight the five most important things on this list. These five things are what you will be working on. The remaining 20 things on your list are now your biggest distractions in your life. They are the things you really want to do, but only avert your attention from the things you want to do even more. The Buffet 2-List isn't helpful because it gives me five things to work on. It's helpful because it gives me 20 things to avoid by all means.

Before I started using this list, whenever I didn't work on a project for a longer time I switched to do something else only to stop working on this as well. Now, I'm always coming back to the same thing. But if something is worth doing, it's worth doing it very (or should I say abysmally) slowly. And just by learning to refocus, I achieved more this year than I did in the five years before.