How many of us lie awake in bed at night feeling guilty about all the unchecked items on our to-do lists and beating ourselves up for not being productive enough? In her latest piece for Quartz, Sarah Todd argues that it’s not an issue of productivity, but rather one of unrealistic expectations. The solution, as she recently learned, was that some things have got to give. Todds’s inspiration was the work of author Tiffany Dufu, who suggests in her new book, Dropping the Ball, that “a lot of us are simply taking on too much.” Drawing from her own example, Dufu—a mother, wife, business owner, writer, and women’s rights champion—says that “I might be better than my staff at drafting annual fund letters, but I brought the most value in face-to-face meetings pitching major donors. No one else on my team could do that.” Naturally she began delegating the task of letter writing to her employees. Dufu arrived at that conclusion through English economist David Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage, which she says can help us set more realistic goals for ourselves.

But how does this apply to practical life and to-do lists? The textbook definition of this principle is “the ability to produce goods and services at a lower opportunity cost, not necessarily at a greater volume,” which means that a country for example should dedicate its resources to producing what it can do very well rather than trying to produce everything it possibly can. So while France can cultivate some great avocadoes (tried and true), what it really excels at is making wine.Dufu’s main premise here is that if we can consider the opportunity cost of everything we set out to achieve in the day—or our lives in general—we would be able to really decide and focus on what is more important at any given moment in time. All it would take is for us to stop for a second to think of the bigger picture: What really matters? What can be postponed? What is really unimportant? Perhaps that way, we might really find ourselves achieving much more than what we originally thought we would.