To-do lists don’t have to be intimidating

Are to-do lists intimidating? Do you shy away from them?

David Allen, the productivity guru who popularized such lists in his trademark Getting Things Done method, has found “list” is actually a dirty word for many people. “Most people haven’t had a lot of success with lists, especially the ones they’ve tried to use to ‘get organized,’” he writes on his corporate blog.

Our instinct is to fight the list and the individual elements on it. That’s because lists are:

• Hard work: It’s difficult to mark everything before you on lists but if you don’t, what’s not written down will fester in your mind, preventing the relief the list is supposed to provide. As well, most big to-do lists have things grouped together that cannot necessarily be done in the context you are in at the time you check the list. That means mental effort is required to calculate what you can tackle now and what you can’t.
• Scary: To-do items are often general or amorphous, without clarity on what specifically to do. “If a to-do on your list is not the very next physical visible action to be done, there is a gap between current reality and what you are looking at, and it can trigger a subtle but very real sense of being out of control with what to do about it every time you glance at it,” he says.
• Disappointing: There are always items left undone at the end of the day and that induces guilt, as well as the need to write them again for tomorrow’s list if you’re not using a digital list that carries uncompleted tasks over.

But he argues there are three simple remedies for those challenges:

• Make the list complete, so your brain gets to, as he puts it, “graduate from the job of remembering.” Everything you need to do is written down. As well, organize your action reminders by context, such as whether you might deal with the item on your phone, computer, when doing errands, or at home. That will allow you to only review what you can actually do at the time you check the list.
• Make sure every actionable item has the very next visible physical action you will take on the matter identified along with it. He says that will ensure you don’t get frazzled by the unknown territory between where you are now and where you ultimately want to get with the overall challenge.
• Only put items that cannot be done any other day on your calendar for the day. Everything else gets placed on an “as soon as I can get to them” list.

Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, recommends two to-do lists on the ThriveGlobal website. One is “open,” for everything that’s on your plate, so it will be very long, and probably carry many of the negative connotations Mr. Allen refers to. But it is not your job to tackle those items – it’s just a long list for organizing action.

You should also keep a “closed” list, with a fixed number of slots, 10 at most. Feed tasks from the open list to the closed one following a rule that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed. “You’ll never get through all the tasks on the open list – but you were never going to in any case, and at least this way you’ll complete plenty of things you genuinely care about,” he says. You can also keep a third list, for tasks that are “on hold” until someone else gets back to you.

Make lists work for you rather than haunt you.

Quick hits

• When attending a virtual conference, don’t multitask, advises HR consultant Sharlyn Lauby. Keep your attention on the speaker.
• Lifelong learners have a passion for exploring, long-time Deloitte researcher John Hagel III has found. They have a long-term commitment to achieving impact in a specific domain that excites them. They are excited by unexpected challenges. And when confronted with those new challenges, they have an immediate desire to seek out and connect with others who can help them find better answers.
• A salesperson must provoke the prospect or client to think by bringing new ideas they had not thought about before. But consultant Colleen Francis warns that if you’re bringing the same new insights to your customer today as six months ago or two years ago, you’re out of date.
• Presentations coach Gary Genard says it’s surprising how many speakers ignore transitions. So they fumble, with phrases like “the next slide shows” or “my next point is.” For your talks to be logical and whole, you must create effective transitions. Part of that arsenal are summaries of what you were just talking about followed by previews of what’s coming next.
• As you progress in your career – new skills, new customers and new titles – entrepreneur Seth Godin points out you’ll need to leave the old job behind. Often we pretend that growth comes with no goodbyes, he says, but you should expect that you will have to jettison things to grow.

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