I am a productive person. At a minimum, every week, I write three pieces for Medium, three pieces for MLB.com, a long, semi-ambitious sports column every week for New York magazine, a big personal essay at my Saturday newsletter, host three different podcasts and try to run 30 miles. (You can see the results of all of this at that aforementioned newsletter.) That’s the minimum. I also write regularly for Vulture, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and whoever else will have me. And the paperback version of my novel How Luckyjust came out, and last week, I turned in the first draft of my next novel to HarperCollins, a book that will be published next May. I also occasionally like to hang out with my family and friends. I try to keep busy. I like to make stuff.

I’m often asked how I make all this stuff, how I remain so productive. This is usually asked with a little bit of suspicion, like I’m secretly addicted to cocaine, or have never met my children — like being productive is somehow an aberration, like there must be some dark secret to it. But there isn’t. The only thing it requires, I’ve found, is organization. If I am make a plan to finish everything I’m required to finish, I’m able to do so without being manic and overwhelmed. The trick is to be explicit about what has to be done, and being able to know when it is completed. Which is to say: You really just need a to-do list. Just write out a to-do list.

I’m writing this to you on a Monday morning, and my current to-do list is above. Look, it’s right here:

This is actually a pretty light list. (I’m still waiting on edits from the first draft of that book. Usually the list, when I sit down on Monday night to make it, extends to a second page. When I get those edits back, it will.) But it is nothing more than a series of achievable tasks, broken down, individually. There’s a lot to do. But if I give myself the satisfaction of crossing off each task when I’ve finished one, it doesn’t feel like the world weighing on my shoulders. It feels almost like a scavenger hunt.

It’s in order for right now, but it can adjust as the week goes on: I make a new list every day. Right now, because it’s Monday morning, I’m still early in the list. (When I finish this Medium post, I’ll check off that “Write Medium Monday” box. Then I’ll go for a run and check off the one below it.) I can add or subtract things as the week goes along, but, barring something that lands out of nowhere in the middle of the week, the list does get shorter as the week goes along. It makes me feel like I’m constantly achieving something as I whittle down the list. Because I am. By the time the end of the week comes, I’ve made a massive amount of stuff, but it doesn’t really feel that way. It just feels like I’ve been checking little things off my list.

I came up with this idea from writing books, actually. The idea of sitting down and writing an 80,000-word book is terrifying — it feels like building a skyscraper, or a fighter jet. But you don’t build a skyscraper in big chunks. You do little parts of it, then add those little parts to other little parts, and then eventually you have a big skyscraper. Sure, 80,000 sounds overwhelming. But if you write, say, 2,000 a week (and this post itself, hardly a long, all-encompassing one, is roughly 750 words, almost halfway there), you will be done, essentially, in 9–10 months. You write a little bit every day, or every week, and then next thing you know, you look up, and you’ve written a book. It’s amazing.

This is the beauty of the old-school Steno pad list. You just do a series of small jobs — some of which on this list are as simple as “Take boys to school” — and they add up to a big massive spread of completed work. You break it up. Suddenly, big jobs seem small, endless scrolls of tasks seem manageable. And you give yourself a series of tiny, but real, victories, all day, every day.

The list never ends. But it feels like it ends. It feels like you are always productive. When people ask me how I am so productive, that’s all I tell them: I trick myself into thinking I’m productive. And therefore I am. The brain is a prickly little organ. Sometimes you have to trick it to do what you want it to do. This is how I do it. I bet it might help you too.

Though hopefully you have better handwriting than I do.

Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.