What does your to-do list say about you?

I took a hard look at my to-do list today.

I didn't like what I saw.

It’s been a little while since I’ve written a newsletter.
Not because I haven’t had ideas, but because I’ve been building, traveling, and saying yes to some new adventures.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what led to today’s realization.

I've been feeling it for weeks: too many things to get done, strategic and tactical, all swirling around in my head at once.

Whenever I start feeling overwhelmed, I dump everything onto one master list. It helps. At least temporarily.

All week long, I've been adding to that list, crossing things off, and reorganizing it.
And it somewhat works. It manages my tasks and commitments.

But it hardly feels like the way I want to live my life.

I chose adventure as my word of the year.

So I asked myself:
​Does the reality of how I've been organizing my life actually reflect that?

It doesn't.

I had 8 categories on that list: Van Life, House, $, Volunteering, Connecting, Topular, Furniture, Fun, and Health.

The first thing I noticed was that health, including scheduling some overdue appointments, was literally and figuratively at the bottom.

A list can tell you the truth about your priorities, whether or not you meant it to.

Deeper questions surfaced:

What am I actually spending my time on?

How much of this list is an old version of myself? One that existed before I chose adventure?

How much of my past am I blindly pulling forward, one category at a time, just because it has always been there?

That question is really an Operating Rhythm question.

Operating Rhythm is about intentionally designing the patterns your life runs on: the days, weeks, months, and seasons that shape how you spend your time.

Most of us build one by accident, reacting to whatever's loudest, and never stop to ask whether the pattern still serves who we're trying to become.

I’d done exactly that. Without realizing it, I was organizing an old version of myself.

So instead of one long flat list of 8 categories, I reorganized around three questions:

The Next Milestone

What has to happen before my next meaningful milestone?

For me, that’s planning the next meeting for Full Moon Forum, the networking group I’m starting for innovative women.

Anything that doesn’t support that milestone can wait.

The Season

What deserves recurring attention, now through the end of summer?

These aren’t one-time tasks. They’re things that deserve a standing place in my week instead of getting buried in a growing list.

The Infrastructure

What quietly supports everything else?

Bills, health appointments, house tasks, car appointments.

Unglamorous. But load-bearing.

If you skip this layer, the other two collapse.

Here's the shift in practice.

Health had been sitting at the bottom of an 8-category list for who knows how long, easy to defer because it never felt urgent next to client deadlines or house projects.

Under the new structure, it moved straight into Infrastructure. Not optional, not someday. Load-bearing.

That afternoon, I scheduled the appointments.

Try this with your own list this week. Don't reorganize by category. Reorganize by these three questions:

🔹 What does the next meaningful milestone in my life actually require?
🔹 What deserves a standing weekly slot this season, not just a line item?
🔹 What infrastructure, unglamorous but load-bearing, do I keep quietly deferring?

Whatever's left over should be asked why it's still on the list.

Key Takeaways

✅ Your to-do list is a mirror, whether you designed it to be or not.​
What’s at the top and what’s buried at the bottom often reveals your real priorities better than your intentions do.

✅ A rhythm is more powerful than a category​
Operating Rhythm means giving the things that matter a standing cadence, daily, weekly, seasonal, instead of letting them compete for attention with everything else on a list.

✅ Infrastructure tasks are unglamorous, but not optional.​
Maintenance items that never feel urgent are what make hitting milestones and the season possible in the first place. Bury them, and eventually everything else stalls.

Wrapping Up

I picked adventure as my word this year. Not "get more done."

Looking at my to-do list reminded me how easy it is to build a life around maintaining the one you already have.

So here's the real question, for me and for you:

Is your list helping you become the person you’re trying to be, or just helping you manage the person you’ve always been?

Further Reading

Today’s newsletter is a personal example of a concept I teach called Operating Rhythm. If you’d like to go deeper, here are a few places to start:

• Start here: What Operating Rhythm is and why it matters.
• When good intentions aren’t enough: The Performance Paradox.
• When your team is scrambling: Why Your Team Feels Chaotic Even When You’re Shipping.
• Diagnose your own team: Five Questions That Reveal What’s Killing Your Team’s Momentum.