Handling to do lists

To do lists are a major part of the daily routine for any productive professional nowadays. We have many different “to do lists” in addition to the classical “to do” list: action items from meetings, appointments in calendar, errand lists, bucket lists, checklists, lists of ideas, lists of things we have done… It seems that the higher we move in our career the more to do lists we have. So handling “to do” lists becomes a large and important part of our routine. How can we improve it?

It definitely helps to have a great memory, but we do not want to remember too much or we may need to sleep half a day. Why is that? The process of long-term memory activation is relatively slow and happens when we sleep. The more we rely on our long-term memory, the more sleep we need. We will be losing productivity very fast this way. So we will remember only things we cannot trust to the paper because they are very urgent, very important, poorly formulated, confidential, or otherwise not paper-ready. For everything else we will use paper, computer and mobile.

Let us start with meeting notes and action items. This is the raw material for our “To do” lists. Here are some tips that may help:

• Start before the meeting. Outline the general expected agenda and expected outcomes – this way your contribution to the meeting will be more significant. Try to generate questions that should be solved during the meeting and write down your notes as “question-answer” or “challenge-solution” or “task-responsibility” template. Generate your own templates.
• Reframe the ideas in your own words. This will make it stick. You should be able to make sense in your own notes.
• Review the notes immediately after the meeting. Try to think if you missed something and act accordingly. Follow up the meeting. Immediately after the meeting people will be much more focused and responsive, than after two days.
• Write down your personal understanding and agenda from the meeting separately from the general meeting agenda. This is for your eyes only, but if you prefer not to risk exposure, use your memory.
• Revisit your notes again after some time. Check what sort of follow-up is required

Some recommendations for traditional to do lists. The main frustration with the “to do lists” is their length, so we try to break them down into manageable lists:

• If you can put a task in your calendar, you may want to schedule it immediately instead of having it in your to do list. Scheduling may not work well for very short or very long tasks, but can be done for many medium tasks.
• For your daily routine have 1 big, 3 medium and 5 small tasks. This is called 1-3-5 rule. Your working memory is useful in your daily planning and contains 7+-2 items, so it helps to have fewer daily tasks than your working memory can handle
• Have separate lists for what you want to do now, and what you can do later when you have more time. If you delayed a task more than once, try to understand what is stopping you from completing it: either remove it from the list or try to generate an environment which will enable task’s completion.
• Try to minimize the number of things you want to do right away.
• Separate the tasks the require low energy and will actually motivate you, the regular tasks, and heavy duty tasks that require full concentration. Maybe handle several to do lists. Trello is a very good software for this strategy.
• Batch like tasks. If you have several similar small tasks try to group them together into medium task. In the same way, try to break larger tasks down into tasks of manageable size.
• Award yourself for completion of tasks by pomodoro breaks or better. Add the awards to estimated time the task will take.

Dealing with daily schedule comes next.
Since we seldom have too many tasks for one day, we can memorize our daily schedule in the morning, and we do not have to remember it later when we go to sleep.
Any memorization method may work here: mental palaces or story methods are probably most useful.
Try to visualize your whole day as a story to boost up motivation and focus on more important tasks, become a hero in your imaginary world.
Always visualize the next task you want to handle before handling it to maximize your efficiency. If you do not feel like doing it, take another task from your to do list instead.
Unfortunately handling your task list is a task in itself and should be done on a daily basis. Maybe weekly if you have a very good memory.

Do not forget your long-term goals.
Formulate your to-do list with things you Must, Should, and Want to do to balance short-term and long-term goals.
Things you really want to do should get their time and place in your busy schedule.
Things you should do and do not really want to do, should be dealt with upmost care: after all, we are very complex and precious machines that should undergo periodic maintenance.

When I first started to write “to do” lists I was absolutely exhausted, since I tried to do everything in my “to do” list. To fix this problem I changed formulation from “to do” to “bucket list”, “monthly maintenance” list, “habit changing” list and other lists. The generic “to do” list is simply called “other tasks” and contains things I did not sort out yet. This reframing allowed me to deal with my tasks on my own terms, in a ways that optimizes my focus, attention and time usage.