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I once spent three hours building a colour-coded spreadsheet to track my weekly reading notes. Nobody asked for it. It solved no real problem. It made me feel organised for about one afternoon before I never opened it again.
The whole time I was making it, I felt productive. The kind of busy that keeps you from noticing you have actually accomplished nothing.
That spreadsheet is where I first understood that effort and value are not the same thing. Without a filter, I will always default to the task that feels satisfying over the one that actually matters.
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The filter I use now.
Before starting any task, I ask: if this never got done, would anything measurable actually change? Not “would someone notice” or “would it look bad”-would a real outcome shift?
Most tasks I used to spend time on cannot answer yes to that. They exist because someone once decided they were a good idea, or because they feel like the responsible thing to do, or simply because they are on a list and lists want to be cleared.
None of those are good reasons to spend two hours of a Tuesday morning on something.
Psychologists have a name for the pull you feel toward those tasks. They call it action bias-the tendency to prefer doing over deciding, because action feels more virtuous than pause, even when the action itself produces nothing.
The filter question is a direct interruption of that pull. It forces you to answer for the value of a task before you invest time in it, not after.
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Here is what this looked like for someone I know.
A colleague of mine, Priya, manages content for a mid-sized software company. Last year she was spending roughly six hours a week on internal reporting-a weekly summary email that went to her manager and two other people. It had been part of her role for two years. Nobody had ever questioned it.
We ran the filter question against it: if this report stopped arriving, would any decision change? She asked her manager directly.
The answer was no-the manager had been skimming it for months and extracting the same two data points each time, which took under a minute to pull manually.
Priya stopped the report, replaced it with a shared dashboard that updated automatically, and recovered five to six hours a week.
She used that time to write a content series that drove more organic traffic in its first month than any single piece they had published that year. Same role. Completely different output.
There is decent research behind this, by the way. A 2007 study of elite soccer goalkeepers in the Journal of Economic Psychology found that goalkeepers dived left or right on over 90 percent of penalty kicks-even though staying still produced statistically better outcomes.
They acted because action felt expected. A more recent paper from 2021 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found across four experiments that people consistently rate action more positively than inaction, regardless of outcome. Acting just feels more intentional. (Happy to send links if you want them-just reply.)
The goal of all this is not to do less. It is to stop mistaking motion for progress. Most people do not need a longer to-do list or a better productivity system.
They need to cancel something they have been doing quietly for months that no longer earns its place.
I am not sure this filter works for every kind of task. Creative work, relationship-building, long-horizon projects-those are harder to evaluate against a single outcome question. But for recurring tasks and administrative work, it cuts through fast.
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So here is one thing to try this week. Pick one recurring task-something you do on a schedule without questioning it. Ask the filter question honestly. If you cannot point to a specific outcome it protects or creates, pause it for two weeks and see whether anyone notices.
If you run the filter on something and it changes what you do-or if you try it and feel like it misses something important-hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and the honest pushback is usually what shapes the next email.