I’m working on a task management app called Momentum and we just implemented a thing we’re calling “gray time”. This is what we call all those tasks we need to do just to keep things going, but they aren’t the most important things. At home, I need to make dinner, go grocery shopping, etc, but the two things I want to get really right in my personal life this year is to lose some body fat and publish a book. In my work, Momentum is the most important thing I am doing.

I know that a big part of my day could be gray. The goal is to get some non-gray time too. If I want to make progress on my most important goals, I have to make sure to acknowledge that everything else is gray.

Sometimes this hurts. I spent a lot of time yesterday working on little tasks—a bunch of them are meaningful to my happiness, like planning a trip and helping my produce my wife’s radio show. It’s not that I didn’t want to do them or that I’m not glad I did, but marking that time as gray makes sure I don’t stuff my day with too many of these tasks at the expense of the main things I am trying to do.