Sort Every Commitment by Joy or Annoy for Clearer Choices

Imagine a table covered in sticky notes—each one a task you’ve been meaning to do. At first, it’s overwhelming. You grab a blue marker and draw a line down the middle of the table, labeling one side “Joy” and the other “Annoy.” You start reading each note aloud: “Attend networking event,” “Call dentist,” “Finish that novel.” As you place each note on the Joy or Annoy side, you feel small reliefs: green light flicks on for dinner with your best friend, red warning flares for that dreaded staff meeting.

By the time you finish, there are twenty notes on Annoy and only eight on Joy. It’s clear where your time goes—and where it shouldn’t. You peel off the top three annoying notes and transcribe them to your delegate list or delete them from your calendar. Your day suddenly looks brighter.

This mechanism echoes the KonMari principle applied to mental clutter: by confronting every commitment at once, you identify what to discard to preserve joy. Behavioral science calls this an affect heuristic—people judge activities by how they anticipate feeling. When you label first and then act, you bypass overthinking and align decisions with genuine emotion.

Picture your to-do list as sticky notes on a desk and draw a dividing line labeled Joy or Annoy. Read and sort each note according to whether it sparks genuine happiness or stress. Once you see which side is overloaded, drop or delegate the top annoying items. Then reassign that time to one joyful activity. It’s a simple mental decluttering that reveals what you should truly care about. Do it right now.