farmdoc's blog post number 26

When I was half my present age, I was a junior staff member of Melbourne University’s medical faculty. The juniors were saddled with the work nobody else wanted, and so it became my lot to give lectures on medical statistics, of all things, to 200 first-year medical students. After the panic attacks subsided, I saw I wasn’t going to be able to offload this burden. What would I do? Well I decided to make a list of topics – a long list so I wouldn’t have to know much about each one or talk about it for very long. That approach has worked for me time and again in the decades since then. Whenever I face a task which seems overwhelming, I break it down into small pieces, and immediately it becomes less daunting. A by-product is the automatic production of a list whose items I can cross off when done. Just about every morning I make a list which I prioritise and sequence, then allocate to each item an estimated duration. Doing this increases my productivity and reduces the number of tasks I forget to do. And it feels oh so good to cross off that final item. I don’t look back on my lecturing days fondly, but without them I may never have become a list-man.