There is this almost masochistic human trait of always wanting to add more and more stuff to our to-do lists and calendars. We add more notes and web clips to our note apps and events to our calendars.

It is just more, more and more.

Yet, if you stop for a moment, is all this extra stuff getting you any faster to where you ultimately want to be? Are all these additional tasks in your task manager, completing your projects more quickly and to a greater quality level?

Probably not.

Years of using a to-do list have taught me one thing: digital to-do lists are the graveyards of non-urgent tasks.

There are many times I have added a task, telling myself this is important, only to forget about it, see it several months later, and wonder why I ever put it in there in the first place.

The problem is that we think the wrong way. Rather than thinking, ‘I must get this into my system,’ we should ask if this idea or task is worthy of being placed in our systems. Will this task or idea serve your goals? If not, then it shouldn’t be in there.

When I use the word “goal” here, I mean in terms of our bigger-picture goals. If you are an employee, perhaps your goal is to get promoted, so will doing this task or executing this idea serve that goal? If you are entrepreneurial, will doing this task or executing this idea serve your long-term business goals?

Thousands of opportunities come our way every day. The problem is not the lack of opportunities; it’s that we have not developed strong enough filters to eliminate opportunities that will not serve us in the long term. We need to strengthen these filters.

This week, when you do your weekly planning session, Before you finish, look at your tasks and appointments for next week and ask yourself if these tasks and appointments will serve your goals and current projects. If not, perhaps you want to remove them and focus only on the tasks that serve your current objectives.

You’ll ultimately get much more important stuff done and those low-value tasks can be quietly discarded and left alone. Don’t worry, if they are important, they’ll come back.