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Each day I rewrite my to-do list on paper. The things I finished get crossed off. The unfinished things only get carried forward if they're worth rewriting. The longer an item survives that process, the louder the signal: this is the one to finish.
Show Notes
Each day I rewrite my to-do list on paper. The things I finished get crossed off. The unfinished things only get carried forward if they're worth rewriting. The longer an item survives that process, the louder the signal: this is the one to finish.
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One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.
I write my experiments on paper.
Written by hand, each morning, from scratch. The ones I finish get crossed off. The ones I don't get carried forward to the next day.
First in, first out.
The undone experiment doesn't get a free pass. It has to survive. Each day I rewrite the list, and each day the undone experiment has to justify its slot. If it doesn't feel worth rewriting, it dies. If it does, it gets carried forward again.
Here's what I noticed: the longer an experiment survives this process, the more likely it is to hit.
There's a 5% baseline. That number keeps showing up in our research on micro app portfolios. Five percent of experiments produce a meaningful result. That's the starting line for anything new.
But an experiment that survives carry-forward for three days is no longer at 5%. The act of manually rewriting it, day after day, is a filter. It's natural selection applied to your own ideas. The weak ones fall off. The ones that keep coming back do so because something in you recognizes they matter.
By the time an experiment has been carried forward five or six times, I would estimate the hit rate climbs to something like 8%, then 13%, then 21%. Not because the experiment got better. Because the ones that weren't going to work already dropped out.
The manual friction is the feature. If the list auto-populated, everything would survive. Nothing would be tested against your own judgment. The rewriting is the selection pressure.
This is the same principle behind rewriting my flywheel from scratch each week. What survives the blank page belongs. But carry-forward applies it at a faster cycle, daily, to the atomic level of individual experiments.
The system is self-cleaning. Good ideas persist. Bad ideas get forgotten. And the ones in between reveal themselves through the friction of being rewritten one more time.
What would change in your work if only the ideas you chose to rewrite by hand each morning survived?