Count how many times you say “I should” in a day. That’s how many invisible bosses you’ve hired.

Should usually arrives from outside. Each one is a standard you picked up somewhere and never examined, and stacked together they make a workload nobody assigned and nobody will thank you for finishing. Some are genuinely yours and worth keeping. The rest run in the background, producing a low level sense of being behind.

Write down every should from one day, then mark who each one belongs to. Cross out the ones you cannot trace to something you actually want. Turn two of the survivors into a specific plan, since a should with a time attached becomes an ordinary task.