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The Not-Todo List

Last year I was involved with a team building an AI Voice Notes app. The original idea was simple: create a tool that could transform voice recordings into well-crafted blog posts and tweets. With a team of smart people, our problem wasn’t coming up with ideas for what to build. It was keeping everyone focused on what the core value of the app was.

“What if we could automatically generate meeting notes?” asked one team member. “Could we add todo extraction?” wondered another. “Reminders based on voice commands would be amazing,” suggested a third.

All brilliant ideas. All exciting possibilities. All the perfect examples of scope creep.

So I said no.

But more than that, we collected them all in a “Not-Todo List”. A document where we explicitly recorded all the good ideas we were intentionally saying no to. Each idea went in with a sentence or two of why we weren’t pursuing it.

This list was not just a list of rejections. It was a statement about where we chose to focus our energy.

The impact was noticed immediately. Team discussions became sharper, and more focused around the core value that the app provided. When a new team member joined, we noticed that they could quickly understand not just what we were building, but what we had deliberately chosen not to build and why.

Making the Implicit Explicit

Talking about this practice with some people outside of our organisation made me realise that our challenge wasn’t unique to our small team. In fact, most decisions in organizations remain implicit. They exist as unspoken assumptions and forgotten conversations. This is dangerous, because it assumes that the right person will always be in the room where a decision about what to do is made.

But what if that one person who has been in all the right meetings is on vacation? Or worse, decides to leave the company? Then all those learnings leave together with that person and the team will undoubtedly have to repeat the process of making the same decisions all over again.

On the contrary. By making our “no” decisions explicit and documenting them, we transformed them from potential risks into strategic clarity.

The Not-Todo List did something else too. It gave us permission to focus deeply on what mattered most. It allowed us to keep the actual todo list lean and we freed up mental space to only think about our core offering.

Each “no” made our “yeses” stronger.

Wrap Up

The Not-Todo List isn’t just for product development. A marketing teams can use it to focus campaigns, executives can use it to allocate resources, and individuals use it to manage personal priorities. Anywhere decisions compete for limited attention, explicitly documenting what you won’t do creates space for what matters most.

In some cases the Not-Todo List could also be called the Not Now List. Some initiatives could become viable as the team grows and customer learnings start appearing.

It’s also very easy to throw every little suggestion into the Not-Todo List. We did this at first, but quickly noticed that this created more clutter and overhead, leading to less focus than before. I recommend spending a few minutes on getting abstraction level right. If you use epics to size features, this is a good level to start at.

Finally I would like to leave you with a question:

How might your organisation benefit from creating a Not-Todo List?

You don’t have to send me your answer, though I’d love it if you did.