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.