Train-wreck mornings are a universal human experience.

You had big plans, but now it’s early afternoon and you’ve accomplished virtually nothing. Maybe it’s your fault, maybe it’s not, but it doesn’t really matter at the moment. What matters is that half your day is gone, and you are not a happy camper.

At this point, productivity ninjas and average folks part ways.

The average person thinks, “Ugh, this day is shot. I can’t believe I wasted all that time. Well, hopefully tomorrow goes better.”

I love to cross things off to-do lists. You probably do, too. Sometimes, I even add completed tasks to my list just so I can cross them out.

To-do lists are such a great task management tool, in fact, that we sometimes forget that the items on our to-do list are just steps toward the larger outcomes to which we’re committed. In other words, it’s not about your to-do list—it’s about your goals. Focus on your goals, and they’ll fill your to-do list with important tasks for you to conquer and cross off. Focus only on completing today’s to-do list, though, and you may be simply running in place.

In any job where we’re paid to interact with other human beings, becoming jaded is an occupational hazard.

Sheer repetition clouds our emotional vision, causing us to treat clients/customers with weary disdain and issue bureaucratic boilerplate answers to every question.

We’ve got to recognize this and fight against it daily. A friend of mine, a public school teacher, put it this way.

“It may be my 15th year teaching fourth grade, but it’s these kids’ first time in 4th grade. They deserve the same experience my first class got 15 years ago.”

I’ll keep it short. Here’s a quick tip on managing your to-do list:

Make sure every entry on your to-do list starts with a verb.

Like mold growing in a wet, warm place, procrastination thrives when tasks are ill-defined and vague. The more specific you can be about the action Future You is supposed to perform, the lower the barrier to performing that action will be.

For example, these entries

The start of the academic year is my busiest time of year. You can relate, I’m sure—whatever your life looks like, we all know the feeling of being so busy that life feels like a car hurtling down the freeway at 100 mph: under control, but barely.

Good productivity hygiene—planning out the week and planning out each day—only helps so much. Even productivity nerds get overwhelmed. Below are the two ideas I keep in mind when my inbox is overflowing, people are beating a path to my door, and multiple deadlines are quickly approaching.