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Tag: To-Do List

  • Science Says 1 Word Will Supercharge Your To-Do List

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    Lots of people love their to-do lists. Take my wife: she has several going at any given time. Task lists keep her focused, on track, and for want of a better word, reassured: writing tasks down eliminates any nagging “I hope I remember to do (that)” concerns.

    Other people have a love-hate relationship with their to-do lists. Start the day with ten things on your list, “only” check off nine, and regardless of how much you did accomplish, you feel you failed. Their to-do list helps keep them on track, but it may not make them feel good about what they’ve achieved.

    Either way, to-do lists work.

    But one simple addition can make them work even better.

    A study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that students who spent a moment writing down why a particular topic had relevance to their life, or to the life of a family member or friend, were much more successful than those who did not. In short, they added a “why” to their task list.

    Interestingly, the writing exercise showed the largest benefits for student groups at greatest risk of academic failure, which makes sense: the harder the task — or the less likely you are to think you can achieve it, and therefore are more likely to quit — the more taking a few seconds to actually write down your “why?” will matter.

    It’s hard to stay the course, much less tackle an unpleasant, boring, or difficult task, when it’s “just” a task. Send an apology to an upset customer? Sift through 50 applications to choose three people to interview? Deal with a poorly performing employee? Those tasks are easy to skip, or put off.

    Until you include a “why”:

    • Apologize to the customer because it’s important to me to repair our professional and personal relationship
    • Create an interview shortlist because hiring a new production supervisor will improve our efficiency and costs, and free me up to focus on bigger-picture goals
    • Talk to the employee about his performance because he’s dragging the team down, and because I really want him to succeed

    Here’s a simple example. We have a small second-floor deck with a flat rubber roof underneath and a drain that carries away rainwater. The drain got clogged, debris from nearby trees collected under the deck… I needed to remove the deck boards, clean the rubber roof, patch a small hole that caused a leak into the room below, and put everything back together. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but — in the same way that every to-do list has at least one item you simply don’t want to tackle — for whatever reason, it felt like a big deal to me.

    So I removed a couple of deck boards, found the hole, and patched it. The important part was done: no more water leaking into the garage. But the sub-structure of the deck was rotted, some of the flashing needed to be replaced… and I kept putting that part off.

    Until I added a “why” to the task. Since the deck is off the kitchen, my wife uses it as an herb garden. She likes growing herbs, likes grabbing a little rosemary or basil or parsley when she cooks… it’s fun for her. Once I added a why to my to-do list — “finish the deck so she can enjoy her herb garden again” — I knocked it out that afternoon. 

    Why? Because now the task had relevance to someone close to me, and therefore to me.

    That’s the beauty of a “why to-do list.” The less appealing, the more difficult, the more complicated, the less likely you are to be motivated to start — much less finish — the more taking a few seconds to write down your “why” matters.

    Try it. Add a “why” beside the items on your to-do list that seem hard, or boring, or intimidating. Write down why it matters. Write down how you, or someone around you, will benefit. Write down what you’ll learn. What you’ll gain.  

    Turn your to-do list into a why to-do list: write down the “what,” then add the “why.” 

    And then do the same for some of your bigger goals, those lingering goals that don’t make your to-do list, whose pursuit tends to get sacrificed in the service of other tasks or goals. (Or for doing things for other people; you’re probably a lot better at doing things for others than for yourself.) 

    Write down why you want to start a side hustle, or business. Write down why you want to go back to school. Write down why you want to spend more time with your family. Write down why you want to get healthier and fitter.

    Don’t just make a list of tasks. Or goals. Write down why each item matters. 

    Even though it only takes a moment, the impact on what you accomplish will be dramatic.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Jeff Haden

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  • How the ‘Waiting Around’ Habit Can Make You Infinitely More Productive Without Working Harder

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    Most people think about productivity as doing more. It’s not. Productivity is mostly about doing more of the right things — and knowing when to do them. For most of us, the problem is that we’re always doing something, so it’s easy to feel busy. But being busy isn’t the same thing as being productive. It’s also not the same as mindlessly occupying our time with things that don’t accomplish anything.

    For example, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at your phone in line at Starbucks, you know what I mean. You check Instagram; scrolling, refreshing, and scrolling some more. It’s not that you’re making progress on anything meaningful, but just because you’re waiting.

    In fact, we all spend a fair amount of time waiting. We wait for meetings to start, or for our friends or colleagues to show up for coffee. We wait for our flight to board, and we wait to pick up kids from school. Those in-between moments add up more than you might think, and how we choose to spend them can quietly change everything about how much we accomplish.

    The power of the in-between

    We tend to think of productivity in terms of large chunks of uninterrupted time, but it turns out the small chunks can be even more useful if you change how you use them. Four minutes waiting in line doesn’t seem like much. Neither does the ten minutes before a Zoom call starts or the seven minutes sitting in your car before you walk into a meeting. But add those together over a week, and it’s hours of time that could be used for something better than doomscrolling.

    No, you’re not going to write a novel while you’re waiting for your latte, or create a new marketing strategy while your flight boards. But you can do something that matters. You can capture an idea before it slips away or jot down a few sentences of an email you’ve been putting off.

    Those moments are perfect for the small mental tasks that never seem to fit into your “real work” time — because they don’t require focus so much as attention.

    The quick brain dump

    My favorite use for those in-between moments is what I call a brain dump. Whenever you’re waiting, open the Notes app or your to-do list, and just write down everything that’s floating around in your head. Maybe that’s the things you need to do, the ideas you don’t want to forget, or the people you need to follow up with. Don’t organize or try to edit them, just get them out.

    Doing that gives your brain room to breathe. It turns all the background noise into something tangible you can deal with later. You’ll be amazed at how much more mental energy you have once you stop trying to remember everything all the time.

    Even if you don’t do anything else with those notes right away, you’ve turned waiting time into something useful. You’ve turned passive time into productive time.

    If you get in the habit of using those little windows well, you’ll start to notice something: you’ll feel less rushed and more organized. You’ll end the day with fewer things hanging over your head because you didn’t waste all the moments in between.

    Waiting around with intention

    The goal is to build a rhythm that makes your actual work time easier. That’s what makes this kind of productivity infinitely powerful: it compounds. Using the time you spend waiting to capture your thoughts or handle a relatively simple task makes the time you spend on bigger tasks more productive. Every note you write down now is one fewer distraction later.

    Here’s the irony — the “waiting around” habit isn’t really about doing more. It’s about doing less mindless stuff. When you stop filling every idle moment with noise, you start to make space for clarity. Sometimes that means opening your notes app. Sometimes it just means taking a breath and letting your brain think.

    It turns out productivity isn’t about doing more stuff; it’s just about being more intentional about waiting around.

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Jason Aten

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  • Trump Said the ‘Wrong’ Thing on Abortion

    Trump Said the ‘Wrong’ Thing on Abortion

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    Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on September 22, 2023

    A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

    “There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

    But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”

    Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”

    Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

    Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”

    A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?

    The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.

    That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.

    “Would you support that?” Welker asked.

    “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.

    Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign staff posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”

    The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”

    One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.

    Read: The abortion absolutist

    Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.

    Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”

    She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.

    Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.

    Mary Ziegler: Roe was never Roe after all

    None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”

    That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.

    Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Do Not Underestimate the To-Do List

    Do Not Underestimate the To-Do List

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    Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more?

    Anxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking hours (and maybe your sleeping ones too).

    Underneath all of the tiresome discourse about enhancing human productivity or rejecting it as a concept, there is a bedrock truth that tends to get lost. There probably is a bunch of stuff that you need or want to get done, for reasons that have no discernable moral or political valence—making a long-delayed dentist appointment, picking up groceries, returning a few nagging emails, hanging curtains in your new apartment. For that, I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen.

    First, cards on the table: I’m not an organized person. Much of the advice on these topics is given by people with a natural capacity for organization and focus—the people who, as kids, kept meticulous records of assignments and impending tests in their school-issued planners. Now they send out calendar invites to their friends once next weekend’s dinner plans are settled and have never killed a plant by forgetting to water it. They were, in my opinion, largely born on third base and think they hit a triple. I, by contrast, have what a psychiatrist once called a “really classic case” of ADHD. My executive function is never coming back from war. I have tried the tips, the tricks, the hacks, the apps, and the methods. I have abandoned countless planners three weeks into January. Years ago, I bought a box with a timed lock so that I could put my phone in it and force myself to write emails. Perhaps counterintuitively, that makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics that are often recommended for getting your life (or at least your day) in order.

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to try putting pen to paper. By the time I was in the working world, smartphones were beginning to proliferate, and suddenly, there was an app for that. In the late 2000s, optimism abounded about the capacity for consumer technology to help people overcome personal foibles and make everyday life more efficient. Didn’t a calendar app seem much neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a list of tasks that need your attention be that much more effective if it could zap you with a little vibration to remind you it exists? If all of your schedules and documents and contacts and to-do lists could live in one place, wouldn’t that be better?

    Fifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be “not really.” People habituate to the constant beeps and buzzes of their phone, which makes rote push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. If you make a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into the ether when you finally lock your phone in an effort to get something—anything!—done. Shareable digital calendars do hold certain practical advantages over their paper predecessors, and services such as Slack and Google Docs, which let people work together at a distance, provide obvious efficiencies over mailing paperwork back and forth. But those services’ unexpected downsides have also become clear. Trivial meetings stack up. Work bleeds into your personal time, which isn’t actually efficient. Above all, these apps and tactics tend to be designed with a very specific kind of productivity in mind: that which is expected of the average office worker, whose days tend to involve a lot of computer tasks and be scheduleable and predictable. If your work is more siloed or scattered or unpredictable—like, say, a reporter’s—then bending those tools to your will is a task all its own. Which is to say nothing of the difficulty of bending those tools to the necessities of life outside of work.

    My personal collision with the shortcomings of digital productivity hacks came during the first year of the pandemic, when many people were feeling particularly isolated and feral. Without the benefit of the routines that I’d constructed for myself in day-to-day life in the outside world, time passed without notice, and I had trouble remembering what I was supposed to be doing at any given time. I set reminders for myself, opened accounts on task-management platforms, tried different kinds of note-taking software. It was all a wash. At the end of my rope, I pulled out a notebook and pen, and flipped to a clean page. I made a list of all the things I could remember that I’d left hanging, broken down into their simplest component parts—not clean the apartment, but vacuum, take out the trash, and change your sheets.

    It worked. When I made a list, all of the clutter from my mind was transferred to the page, and things started getting done. It has kept working, years later, any time I get a little overwhelmed. A few months after my list-making breakthrough, I tried to translate this tactic to regular use of a planner, but that tanked the whole thing. I just need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no use in getting cute with it. Don’t make your to-do list a task of its own.

    All of this might sound preposterously simple and obvious. If you were born with this knowledge or learned it long ago, then I’m happy for you. But for people like me for whom this behavior doesn’t come naturally, that obvious simplicity is exactly the genius of cultivating it. Your list lives with you on the physical plane, a tactile representation of tasks that might otherwise be out of sight and out of mind (or, worse, buried in the depths of your laptop). It contains only things that you can actually accomplish in a day or two, and then you turn the page forever and start again. If you think of more things that need to be on the list after you think you’re done making it, just add them. If you get to the last few things on the list and realize they’re not that important, don’t do them. This type of to-do list doesn’t take any work to assemble. It isn’t aesthetically pleasing. It doesn’t need to be organized in any particular way, or at all. It’s not a plan. It’s just a list.

    If you’d feel more convinced by some psychological evidence instead of the personal recommendation of a stranger with an aversion to calendars, a modest amount of research has amassed over the years to suggest that I’m on the right track. List-making seems to be a boon to working memory, and writing longhand instead of typing on a keyboard seems to aid in certain types of cognition, including learning and memory. My own experience is in line with the basic findings of that research: Writing down a list forces me to recall all of the things that are swimming around in my head and occasionally breaking through to steal my attention, and then it moves the tasks from my head onto the paper. My head is then free to do other things. Like, you know, the stuff on the list. There are no branded tools you have to buy, and no subscriptions. It cannot be monetized. Write on the back of your water bill, for all I care. Just remember to pay your water bill.

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    Amanda Mull

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  • Why You Need a “To Don’t” List to Be a Great Leader | Entrepreneur

    Why You Need a “To Don’t” List to Be a Great Leader | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Are you one of those business owners who tend to create a never-ending stream of to-do lists? Maybe you even draw those little squares next to each task and feel a bit of a dopamine rush each time you check off another box.

    To-do lists are such simple but effective task tools for busy entrepreneurs. Of course, in today’s digital world, you might not be putting pen to yellow pad, opting instead for a scheduling or time management application. Whether high-tech or old-school, to-do lists serve a very important purpose in the life of an active business owner. They keep us on track, on task and on time.

    Many of the more organized folks among us carve out time each evening to plot the coming day and prepare their to-do lists accordingly. However, that level of systematic mapping is not for everyone. Many successful people I know maintain a remarkable to-do list in their heads and tackle these tasks as they have the time. The reality is, in one form or another, all business owners have a running to-do list. And those lists can be overwhelming at times.

    That is the dirty little secret about to-do lists. While they might feel comforting in that they allow us to gauge our progress related to our pending tasks, they mask the fact that many of those activities have no business being on that list in the first place. And when I say many, I really mean most.

    So perhaps it is time for a different kind of list.

    Related: 3 Traits Every Successful Entrepreneur Should Have

    You’re not supposed to do it all

    I had a wonderful associate at The Alternative Board, the late great Steve Davies. He was in the office one day and noticed that I was drowning in an endless sea of tasks; my exhausting to-do list was truly unrelenting. I will never forget how Steve looked me straight in the eye, pointed at my list and said, “As the CEO of a global organization, you shouldn’t be doing half of those things.” I knew he was right, but nobody had ever mentioned it before.

    Steve helped me to get things under control by insisting I put together what he called a To Don’t List. He made it really simple. And it was a pivotal moment in my leadership journey.

    Creating a To Don’t list

    Steve explained that I should keep a piece of paper or notepad in the top drawer of my desk. Then came the self-awareness part. He said that whenever I caught myself doing a task that I probably should not be doing, or that could be done more efficiently by someone else, I needed to pull out that sheet of paper and write the task down.

    I want to be clear here. The items added to my To Don’t List were not there because they were below my pay grade. They were not beneath me. They were simply tasks to which I didn’t add any particular value and prevented me from executing higher-level strategic objectives for the organization. So they were prime candidates for delegation.

    Then it was time for some reflection. Once a week or so, I was to review that list and pick one or two items just to stop doing. It was scarier and felt a little more daring than it sounds. I asked myself, who could do this better? Someone internally? Should it be outsourced? Or perhaps the task held such little value that it should be eliminated.

    This was a big step in the right direction. Slowly but surely, my To Don’t List allowed me to spend less time on the things that weren’t really important and more time on the things that required my attention. Throughout the years, it has helped me increase my productivity tremendously.

    Related: You Don’t Have to Go It Alone. It’s Time to Let Go and Let Others Help.

    Tasks for your To Don’t list

    Every business owner is different, as is what is required of them to run a thriving company. But here are some common items you might consider as prime candidates for your own To Don’t List.

    Administrative Tasks: Particularly if you have a secretary or executive assistant, consider delegating the preponderance of scheduling and routine paperwork to someone else.

    Daily Ops: Unless yours is a small business that lacks the staff to conduct day-to-day operations, like inventory or order processing, leave those tasks to your team – and refrain from micromanaging them while you are at it.

    Technology Troubleshooting & Maintenance: If you have an IT team, consider them your resident experts. They likely don’t need substantial input at a technical level, although you are likely still required strategically.

    Routine Decision-Making: Your organization needs your vision. They need your leadership. What they don’t need is for you to oversee every minor decision — delegate decision-making authority to trusted managers.

    Employee Supervision: It is not your responsibility to babysit your team. They are professionals who are capable of performing their jobs without you breathing down their necks, so let them.

    I sometimes wonder if my colleague Steve realized how positively and profoundly his simple advice on creating a To Don’t List affected me as a business leader.

    I hope it works for you too.

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    Jason Zickerman

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  • Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

    Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

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    The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

    “I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

    It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

    Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots

    Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

    According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

    But he isn’t the only one.

    Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

    The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

    “I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

    At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

    “Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

    It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

    From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church

    And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

    It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

    “A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

    The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

    “He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

    Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement

    Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

    Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

    “Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

    Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

    Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

    There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

    In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

    There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

    Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis

    Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

    “So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

    She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

    This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

    DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

    “He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

    Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

    Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

    Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

    “It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

    Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis

    Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

    In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

    The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

    Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

    Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

    If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

    That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

    Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence

    “The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

    After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

    Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

    Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

    “He fights,” Byrd replied.

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    Tim Alberta

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  • Is Your To-Do List Overwhelming? Here’s What You Need to Do.

    Is Your To-Do List Overwhelming? Here’s What You Need to Do.

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Do you feel extremely overwhelmed from looking at your to-do list? Do these tasks feel infinite and impossibly daunting? Do you dread opening your laptop with the idea of facing your unorganized, messy assignments? We’ve all been there.

    More often than not, going through your tasks may feel like wading through waist-high sand. This may sound trivial, but work stress often comes from task disorganization, making them look more difficult than they actually are. Worse, it can deter your motivation, productivity and sense of accomplishment. From swamped emails to meeting deadlines, the anxiety of not knowing where to start or how to finish can burn you out.

    Perhaps it’s about time to regroup and rethink the ways to manage your overwhelming to-do list. Here’s how:

    Related: The Hidden Secret to Completing Your To-Do List

    1. Delete low-priority tasks

    The truth is you can’t do it all. The first step to managing your to-do list is to sort your tasks according to priority. Keep an eye on your low-priority tasks. Quickly go over them and assess their importance. If deemed inconsequential, delete them. The reality is some tasks are better deleted than completed. Just because they’re on your to-do list doesn’t mean you have to do them.

    Low-priority tasks are jesters in a deck of cards. Oftentimes, they’re there for no reason, and yet they’re the biggest obstacles that prevent you from completing your high-priority workload. For one, low-priority tasks don’t age well. They may have displayed importance the moment you captured them, but some tasks simply resolve on their own and no longer require further attention, making them obsolete. In fact, they are often tagged as “no priority.” Not only do they make your list a lot longer than it is, but it takes you in a completely different direction, hindering your productivity.

    Use your sense of discernment in determining their relevance. For each task, ask yourself, “Is this necessary?” If the answer is “no,” delete them, move on, and don’t waste your time.

    2. Batch similar tasks together

    It’s important to remind yourself that you’re human, not AI. Unlike a computer, you can’t effectively run multiple processes at a time. The brain takes time to process whenever you switch contexts, halting you from finding your flow.

    The key to productivity is by getting into the groove. Once you’ve found your rhythm, it will be much easier for you to go with your workflow effectively and efficiently. Being in the zone is key to accomplishing tasks quickly without compromising their quality. The trick to this is grouping similar tasks together.

    Task batching is an effective productivity strategy that helps you avoid context switching. By categorizing your work, you’ll be able to find a perfect approach that applies to a variety of assignments, making it feel like it’s just one fluid execution rather than mentally jumping back and forth from one type to another. Not only will this make your to-do list a lot more organized and easy on the eyes, but it will also improve your speed and efficiency.

    Related: The 5-Minute Solution That Can Transform Your To-Do List

    3. Make a list of completed items

    On top of your to-do list, it’s equally important to include your completed items. This will not only help you track your progress, but it will also help boost your confidence by knowing how productive you have been. If it’s taking a long while to fill your completed items, that’s your cue to reconsider how to improve your speed. Perhaps you’re taking too long on a task that’s not necessarily urgent? Perhaps you’re spending too much time in your inbox? Perhaps you’re prioritizing obsolete tasks? It’s your opportunity to reassess and adjust to hit your daily quota.

    4. Don’t overcheck your inbox

    Did you know that most professionals spend more than two hours of their time at work checking their emails without even realizing it? From waiting for responses and digging through old attached files, to simply mindlessly scrolling, over-checking your email is one of the leading productivity deterrents in a workplace. Ideally, one shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes in their inbox. Remember that it’s a communication tool, not your task manager. Not only does it interrupt your flow, but it interferes with your work execution. My friend Yoel Israel, CEO of WadiDigital, once told me during a collaborative work session that I spend too much time in my inbox. I agreed with him and fixed it.

    Keep in mind that emails can wait. They don’t bear significant weight in the urgency of your tasks. Consider alloting a good amount of 25 to 30 minutes a day for checking your inbox — 15 minutes in the morning and another 15 in the afternoon. Or you can evenly divide it into seven minutes every 2 hours.

    Related: Find a To-Do List Strategy That Works for You

    The golden rule is to always be on top of your to-do list. From the level of urgency and degree of importance to the type of context, the key is to be organized to achieve clarity on what to do first, what to do next and what not to do. Strategize, launch your tactics, and attack. Control your tasks; don’t let your tasks control you.

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    Omri Hurwitz

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