Decide once, do once separate choosing from executing to avoid drift

Most to-do lists mix the deciding with the doing. That’s like choosing a meal with every bite. The mind gravitates to quick wins, you collect checkmarks, and at 5 p.m. you realize the important work didn’t happen. A simple fix is to split the jobs. The Might‑Do list is where ideas and projects live without deadlines. The Burner List is where today’s focus is chosen and protected.

Here’s how it feels in practice. You take five minutes to scan the Might‑Do and select one highlight for tomorrow. Then you rewrite your Burner sheet: one front-burner project with its next three actions, one back-burner with two actions, and a small kitchen sink for life’s stray bolts. The constraint is the point. Paper is finite, so you must be too.

Every two or three days, you burn the sheet and rebuild it from reality, not wishful thinking. The act of rewriting forces trade-offs you’d otherwise avoid. You recognize that moving the back-burner project up means saying no to something else, and that honesty keeps your schedule humane. A quick micro-anecdote: a friend used this to renovate a kitchen without losing weekends to errands that felt urgent but weren’t.

Cognitively, you’re reducing choice overload (Hick’s Law) and preventing the Zeigarnik effect from nagging you about everything at once. By separating prioritization from execution, you free work time from constant meta-decisions, which preserves attention for the task at hand.

Capture everything into a Might‑Do list so you don’t have to decide in the moment, then pick tomorrow’s single highlight from it and block time on your calendar. Rewrite a two-column Burner List with one front-burner project and its next few actions, one back-burner project, and a tiny kitchen-sink section for miscellany. As items finish, toss the sheet and rebuild every few days so your plan reflects reality. Keep it on paper and within sight so your brain doesn’t have to keep re-remembering; start a fresh sheet this evening.