You’ve spent a unit on the recovery half. Welcome to the demands half — which is where the cause actually lives, and which needed the capacity Unit 2 has been building.

Start by getting it out of your head: everything currently costing you something at work, on one list, in whatever order it arrives.

Write the things that aren’t tasks too — this is where most lists go wrong. A to-do list holds tasks. A load includes:

• The conversation you’ve been avoiding for three weeks.
• The thing you’re behind on that nobody has mentioned yet.
• The colleague whose messages make your stomach drop.
• The decision that isn’t yours but that you’re carrying anyway.
• The ambiguity — the project where nobody has said what “done” means.
• The commute, the rota, the open-plan noise, the meeting that could be an email.

Those are demands in exactly the Lesson 2 sense. They cost you, they’re chronic, and they’re invisible on a task list — which is why the task list keeps telling you that you should be coping.

Two things usually happen when people do this.

The first is that the list is shorter than expected. Not small — shorter. A shapeless, unbounded dread turns out to be eleven specific items, and eleven is a number you can look at.

The second is that something obvious turns up that had never been named. The single recurring meeting that ruins two days. The one relationship that accounts for most of the dread. It had been invisible precisely because it was constant.

Don’t solve anything yet. This lesson is only the inventory, and there’s a reason for that: the moment you start solving, you stop listing. You go deep on item three, and the other eight never make it onto the page. Get all of it down first — sorting is the next lesson.

Two kinds of things people leave off, and shouldn’t:

• The things you’ve decided don’t count. The commute you chose, the role you asked for, the hours everyone works. Whether a demand is your fault has nothing to do with whether it costs you, and a list that only holds unfair items is missing most of the load.
• The things that are almost fine. The meeting that’s only slightly too long, the process that’s only mildly stupid. Individually beneath mentioning; collectively often the bulk of it. Write them down and let the list show you the volume.