Week of March 10th, 2025

One of the most challenging things about “to-do” list culture is not just how long the lists seem to be. It’s about our propensity to beat ourselves up internally for never getting enough done.

There is always more to do. Why isn’t my thesis done yet? Why haven’t I got my membership website up and it’s already March? I should have gotten a promotion by now, but instead I procrastinated on this project. I would be so much closer to my goal if I could only finish my “to-do” list!

The good news is that I have a solution to this problem for you. And you know me. I always have a solution for something.

My miracle solution has nothing to do with a handy trick to get more done. It isn’t about maximizing your time or prioritizing better. I am not even going to show you a system to help you to remove items from your list that you don’t really need to do.

Not at all.

My secret to a better and more productive life is simple:

In addition to your daily or weekly “to-do” list, create an accomplishment list.

Every time you check an item off your “to-do” list, don’t just check it off. Actually physically copy and paste it to your accomplishment list. Here is the important and critical part: at the end of the day, read your accomplishment list and spend a few moments digesting what you have actually completed. Chances are good it is a fair amount more than you would have guessed.

“But Mike,” you might think, “that is a waste of time.”

Sure, if you think copy/paste of several items into a separate notepad and reading it each day will take you an hour, then go ahead and think that way. It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes per day to make this small change. But those few minutes will make a world of difference.

How come? Well, it is all in our brain chemistry. Our brains are wired to look for threats. “To-do” lists silently activate the “fear” part of our minds because we start subconsciously asking ourselves what would happen if we didn’t attend to those items every day. That list starts to look like a threat. We start thinking, “oh no! What will happen if I don’t have everything done on my list today? Something terrible, obviously.”

And what do we often do when we are afraid? We freeze. We avoid the danger. In other words, we don’t get things done.

To make matters worse, the vast majority of us manage to find a few new things to do every day, so our threat lists grow to the point where we have a litany of daily tasks that would take the most energetic among us 22 days to have a hope of tackling.

Try something new for me: create the accomplishment list. Just do it for a week, and then review at the end of the week if you don’t want a daily review. I’d recommend the latter.

You accomplished all that. Yeah.

You are a productive human being, and you are not under attack.

Your accomplishment list will make you feel better about your work. It will get you to relax about your perceived lack of accomplishments by showing you tangible evidence that you are actually a productive person. And most importantly, it will allow you to stop berating yourself like some deranged parent with a yardstick and too much time and anger on their hands.

You’ve got this.

This Week’s Transits

Ah, if only planets never went retrograde. Wouldn’t that be a grand world, fellow wolves?

In all seriousness, that would be terrible. I’m happy for retrograde Venus and Mercury, and you should be too. We all need time to process what we learn. Like the inhale and exhale of breath or the tides of the ocean, not everything in the world can be about endless doing and endless connecting. We need time to process. We need retrogrades.

The biggest piece of Astrological news this week is that we have a full Moon and lunar eclipse in Virgo overnight from the 13th to the 14th, which is this Thursday and Friday. This is a very powerful full Moon and instills a strong earthy energy where we are all going to feel a lot like refining and pruning our lives in various ways.

Virgo is all about perfecting and purifying ourselves, though that perfection can sometimes take the form of feeling like nothing we do is enough. That sentiment may be running very high on Thursday night. If you are feeling very down and like you have not been doing nearly enough to further your goals, it is just a temporary feeling and this transit will pass.

I talked about lists for a reason in my article this week. If you want to actually harness this Moon’s energy for good, then start making some healthy lists. Virgo loves lists!

• List the people in your life who make you feel good.
• List activities you enjoy that make you feel good.
• List five things that are amazing about you as a person.
• And most importantly make a list of five reasons why you are being so hard on yourself. Read the back to yourself. How many of them feel valid to you? I'm guessing the answer will be zero, and I’m not kidding.

After this nit-picky fiasco in the form of a Virgo full Moon we get Mercury retrograde again, which begins this weekend. If you are a true Astrology Wolf, you have learned to love Mercury Retrograde. I’m actually not being sarcastic - this retrograde period is a good time to reflect on all you have learned over the last couple of months and adjust your plans accordingly so that you don’t get led astray by ideas that are incongruous to your goals so much in the near future.

If I were you, I would plan not to make any large decisions this weekend as you may not be in the best headspace to do so. If you do go on a planning spree this week due to the full Moon that is fine; just make sure you are all wrapped up by Friday afternoon.

The mental energy and restlessness we all feel this week will be with us for a bit, so the more you can slow down, take some deep breaths and take things

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the better off you will be. Slow down and enjoy your list-making adventures this week.

Words of wisdom: There is a paradox where the faster we work, the less we actually accomplish. This actually also holds true for the quality of our work. In fact, I’d say that the less time we have the more productive we tend to be. Don’t wish for endless time. Instead, how can you create limited time?