In these distraction-riddled times, it’s incredibly easy to not be earning any money.

Here’s a way to stop doing that.

This is a story about a part-time freelance writer (hi there) who found himself with lots of things he wanted to do, many of which didn’t help his fledgling career at all. He knew how to destroy the world so he could sit down and work – that wasn’t the problem. No, the thorn in his paw was that he never quite knew what he should be doing next.

So he made himself a bucket list.

Ah, bucket lists. Wonderful things. As the name suggests, these are imaginary receptacles that you sling everything into, willy-nilly. You add things to the end of them and you do the things at the top of them, crossing entries off with a different pen that has a nice thick nib so the line is sufficiently solid-looking. A permanent marker pen is great; it squeaks. The squeak of victory.

Here are my problems with bucket lists:

1. I list the easiest things.

2. Then I list the hardest things.

Easiest things: do the washing-up, order train tickets online, ring a friend, catch up on blog comments, read the latest at World Hum, oil the chain on my bike, go shopping…

Hardest things: finish my Radio 4 Afternoon Play pitch, get healthier, make $1m, win the Nobel peace prize, learn to dance, have a fulltime sustainable writing income, be adored by millions, etc.

And so here’s my experience of working through a bucket list: YAY! YAY! YAY! YAY! Oh.

Brick wall.

So then I cheat by changing the rules: I don’t have to do them in order. I can skip the tricky ones and do the others first. And so that’s what I do. And my life is suddenly in danger of being an inexhaustible series of easy wins, lined up in front of me, all the way to the horizon. To infinity and beyond.

But you feel busy. You feel dynamic. Yay yay YAY.

Generally, I bucket-think myself into long-term inactivity. Oh, sure, I’m getting stuff done, but it’s the easy, shallow stuff, not the jobs I know I really should be doing. Why? Because they’re usually too big to cross off.

One way round this is to break your big wins into little ones that will fit on your attention-deficient bucket list – but in doing so, you run the risk of treating them superficially, of always trying to hurry on to the next one. Goal-based living, see: it wears you out, turns you into a box-ticker, obsessed with achievement at the expense of experience. You don’t dig deep because the next thing is always on your mind because your list is still so damn long.

So then I tried prioritizing my list and stick to a rigid order.

1. [Important stuff].

2. [Slightly less important stuff].

………

48,962. Do the washing up

And this failed because I like the thrill of chaos and variety. I’m not a program – I’m a person. A thing designed to thrive on the different and the unexpected and the aimlessly fun. If I did nothing but the most important things, I’d feel shackled, unable to goof around and pick tasks creatively, on a whim. (Also, I’d have a lot of washing-up to do).

Cubicle-thinking, I call it.

So then I made myself a very strong coffee, got a big piece of paper and wrote lots of foul language all over it. This calmed me. Then I turned the paper over and scribbled a few ideas. One stuck.

And here it is. A better way to manage my bucket-brain. And my version is all about Money (the great enabler of Fun).

Here comes my train of thought. Please stand behind the yellow line, thank you.

1. I need to be doing 3 types of Stuff. (a) Stuff directly for Money, (b) Stuff indirectly for Money, and (c) Stuff almost certainly not for Money in any conceivable way.

2. Let’s call those Red (No Money), Amber (Some Money) and Green (YAY Money).

3. So now I take my precious, inadequate bucket list and I chop it up, scattering the contents into these three categories.

eg.

GREEN: Work on radio play idea; write freelance blog post for [online market]; pitch magazine article; work on book.

AMBER: Networking; research writing markets & job offers; vocation-related reading; work on blog’s SEO profile; planning travel; sitting in the garden, thinking hard about things.

RED: See how many Pringles I can fit into my mouth at one time without choking; reading purely for fun; watching season 6 of The Shield; going for a walk to see if I can get myself lost (which is the best way to explore your neighbourhood); hanging out with friends; sitting in the garden, thinking aimlessly about things.

4. When I’m done with chopping up my bucket list, I get three big pieces of paper. (They’re different colours).

5.  And I fill them.

6. Then (this is the tricky bit) I divide up my free time between Red, Amber and Green activities. Then I do only what’s on each of those lists within those designated parts of my day. I can switch between things or pick on a whim – but only within those limits.

This proportioning is the difficult bit. You have to be realistic. Need a complete day off? It’s all Red. Want to be super-productive? Push the proportion of Green and Amber up as far as you dare. And so on

The great thing is that all three lists should have roughly the same amount of things on them if I’m healthily focussed on my work. Too much on the Red list? Slacker, j’accuse. Nothing on the Green list? It seems you’ve been neglecting Amber, my friend. Nothing on Red? FUN IS FUTILE, NUMBER ONE. YOU WILL ALL BE ASSIMILATED. etc.

Right now, this productivity method suits me nicely. It’s bucket-listing, yet not. It’s prioritizing, yet not. Best of both worlds, yet not quite either.

Any of the above struck a chord with you?

Images: lanchongzi, wwarby, Doug88888, longhorndave and AlanCleaver_2000.