Free Not-To-Do List Builder + Template

A not-to-do list is the inverse of a to-do list: a short set of things you have decided in advance you will not do. Tim Ferriss popularised the personal version, and Jim Collins built the same idea into a business discipline he called the stop-doing list. Both start from the same observation. Most people already know what they should be doing. What quietly wrecks the week is everything else they also do.

Subtraction outperforms addition

Adding a new habit costs time you have to find. Removing a bad one gives time back immediately, and it compounds twice: you recover the hour and you stop paying the recovery cost that follows. Every yes you give is a no to something invisible, so an unexamined calendar is a set of choices you never actually made. Deciding in advance also protects your decisions from decision fatigue. If "no meetings without an agenda" is already written down, the 4pm invite is not a judgement call at your worst hour of the day, it is a rule you set at your best.

How the stop-doing list works

Collins argued that a great to-do list is worth little without a stop-doing list beside it, because focus is defined by what gets cut. The framing is deliberately final. You are not scheduling less of something, you are ending it. That is why each line here reads as an absolute: "I will not take calls that could be messages" holds up better under pressure than "I will take fewer calls", because an absolute leaves no negotiating position.

Three to five lines, not twenty

A twenty-line not-to-do list is a wish list. You cannot defend twenty boundaries at once, and a list you break every day teaches you to ignore it. Three to five lines is the range where each one is memorable enough to fire in the moment the temptation appears. When one becomes genuinely automatic, graduate it and free the slot for the next one. A not-to-do list should shrink over time. That is what success looks like.

Every stop needs a replacement

A habit is a response to a cue, and removing the response leaves the cue with nowhere to go. This is why stopping alone rarely survives a bad week. Pair every line with what you will do instead: not "no phone in bed" but "phone charges in the kitchen, book on the nightstand". The weekly check in this tool asks a single honest question per line, held, mostly, or slipped, and builds a hold rate over time. A line stuck below 40% is usually not a discipline problem. It is a missing or unbelievable replacement.

Everything you write here stays in your browser using localStorage. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and no one else can read your list. When you are ready to decide what fills the space you just cleared, the 1-3-5 task planner and the shutdown ritual checklist pick up where this leaves off.