I find it helpful to give myself permission decide NOT to do something. The to-do list is a bunch of things that I thought were important when I wrote them down. If the next day I only do half of them, but feel those were the important ones, then I have success. If I decide that half of them aren't worth doing, the doing those would be failure.
The goal of the list isn't to beat you up, but just a tool to make sure that at the end of the day you did the things that were important to you and YOU get to decide what that means.
Tony Robbins has a todo/project planning system called RPM. The training for it is hours and hours long, and the maintenance of it is also crazy. I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it verbatim, it’s just too much. That being said…
It did bring up the concept you mention. It basically had a person set their goal, then write down everything they could do to get there. From there you pick the ones that will get you the most bang for the buck. And when you hit your goal, you’re done. If that means it only took 5 tasks out of 47 possible, great. Goal achieved, trash the rest of the tasks and move on.
The goal of the list isn't to beat you up, but just a tool to make sure that at the end of the day you did the things that were important to you and YOU get to decide what that means.