Master Your To-Do List

The human brain is great at processing information but not at storing it. A to-do list can be a helpful tool to assist us in remembering all that needs to be done. Have an idea for an article? Dump it in your idea file or add it to your to-do list. Remembered that you need to add a privacy policy to your blog? Add it to your blog to-do list.

Whether you use pen and paper, a text file synchronized across your devices, or a proper to-do application, you’re definitely less likely to forget important tasks if you add them to a to-do system whenever they come to mind. Another benefit of this approach is that you don’t ever have to worry about remembering what to do since you systematically added ideas and tasks to your to-do list as they came to you.

This, in turn, can reduce your stress and the sensation of forgetting something important. Not to mention the feeling of being overwhelmed that we all experience at some point in our lives. In the aftermath of the arson fire I mentioned before, I got to practice my time management skills as I literally rebuilt many aspects of my life from scratch. I don’t think I could have made it without the help of a solid to-do system and the belief that it could be done.

Define Your Goals

Before you start an initial brain dump of all the things you need to do, I recommend that you dedicate some time to setting goals.

Goals give you direction and allow you to devise a proactive plan of actions to reach them. They also offer a much-needed moment in our busy lives to reflect on what you really want from your life. They are not as important as the actual system of actions you’ll adopt, but they’re an important catalyst.

Like Jim Rohn, the father of the modern self-improvement movement used to say, you cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight. Goals are a first step toward changing your direction. It might all be about the journey and not the destination, but it helps if you’re headed somewhere pleasant rather than nowhere—or worse, in a bad place that’s rife with stress, worry, and depression.

You want to set a couple of goals for each area that matters to you. Blogging may be one such area, so you would create a couple of goals for your blog. If you decide to take a broader look at your life, you can include other areas and define one or two key goals for each area. If possible, make them SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

The areas I use to identify goals to improve myself are health (including mental health), spirituality (religious or not), growth/learning, career, finances, relationships, and leisure.

It’s perfectly okay to limit your to-do list to the professional sphere if you wish. The advice I provide here is not revolutionary, but it can be helpful, regardless of the scope you apply it to.

Define Your Projects

Just as there are countless project management apps, you’ll find a plethora of to-do apps available on the market. I’ll suggest a few options I’ve personally found to be effective. Fellow productivity enthusiasts reading this book might prefer a different app, but the key take-home message here is that you should quickly try some of these options and then start with one that works well enough for you.

There is no perfect to-do system, and searching for one can become a distraction and time waste in and of itself (second only to the temptation of creating your own to-do app).

I can personally recommend the following to-do applications, having used each of them at one point or another over the years:

• TickTick: Overall the best cross-platform choice I’ve found to date

• Todoist: A much more popular alternative to TickTick and also quite good

• TaskWarrior: If you live and breathe the command line

• Things: Gorgeous minimalist GTD (Getting Things Done^[66]) option for Mac/iOS users

• OmniFocus: Powerful option for Mac/iOS—steeper learning curve, but worth it

• Trello: If you prefer a kanban approach to to-do list management

• KanbanFlow: An alternative to Trello that I’ve found to be better suited for a GTD-like to-do system

• Dynalist: Not a traditional to-do list, but the outliner approach allows you to create highly organized hierarchies of lists

I have been an avid user of TickTick because I needed a cross-platform option for having a Mac but also an Android phone. It’s not as slick as the Mac-only options, but it gets the job done. Recently I made the decision to switch back to iOS, so I’ve been using Things in anticipation. It lacks a few advanced features of TickTick, but it provides a very polished user experience. My go-to choice might change in the future, but the general principles of how I go about my to-do stay more or less the same.

Once you have decided on a particular to-do list app (even if it’s just pen and paper), I suggest that you do an initial brain dump. Write down every task that comes to mind and enter them in your to-do app (typically in an Inbox list/project). You’ll definitely forget things, but that’s okay because you’ll be able to add them later when they come to mind. If you follow David Allen’s GTD system strictly, you won’t add tasks that you can accomplish in just two minutes. You’ll just do them right then and there. But everything else can be added to the pile as it pops into your brain.

Next, you’ll want to look at the list of goals you created in the previous section and extract actions that will get you closer to these goals. Keep in mind that the most powerful actions are the small routines you repeat frequently. These end up becoming your habits. But your system will certainly contain a mix of both one-off tasks and routines.

An example of two financial goals might be paying off your student loan by a set date and saving enough money to retire at the age of 65. From these desired outcomes you can derive, in some instances by literally doing the math, the system of one-offs and routines, respectively, that you need to adopt. Dump those into your to-do app.

For tasks that have a set date, like a meeting with a financial advisor, I like to use my calendar rather than the to-do list. I then have two calendar reminders set, one for a day and one for an hour before. This way I won’t forget and my to-do app shows me my calendar from within the UI, so I don’t need to replicate it there.

At the moment, I have four areas in Things (think of them as folders in other to-do apps): personal, work, business, and miscellaneous. I then categorize my to-do tasks further in lists/projects within those areas. These lists roughly correspond to areas of my life, plus specific projects. For example, for personal I have the following to-do lists:

• Self-Growth
• Health
• Relationships
• Finances
• Learning
• Photography
• Leisure

Some people adopt Stephen Covey’s style of organization, where they group to-do tasks by life role instead (e.g., Husband, Employee, Blogger, etc). There is no right or wrong approach here, just what works best for your way of thinking.

My blogs are listed under the Business area, each with their own list. Writing this second edition is its own project, also under Business.

It’s worth noting that not everything can be neatly categorized, so don’t obsess too much. Some tasks are just miscellaneous or errands. Under Miscellaneous I have the following lists:

• Household
• Errands
• Miscellaneous
• Groceries
• Wish list
• Meta

Meta is an important one. It’s where I put maintenance tasks like cleaning the to-do inbox, devising a daily plan from my to-do list, and reviewing all the tasks in my to-do lists weekly, for example, not to mention measuring progress monthly or quarterly to make the required adjustments. It’s important to do this sort of maintenance to stay on top of your overall list and your progress.

Assign Priorities to Tasks

A lot of people feel overwhelmed by to-do lists. I think it comes down to a common misconception: the idea that you need to do everything on the list. This is generally not possible and not the point of having a list.

The real point of having a to-do list is dual in nature: 1) to dump tasks out of your brain; 2) to quickly determine what you should be working on at a given time. A to-do list system should enable you to accomplish those two steps, which are crucial for high productivity.

For a to-do list system to help you with the latter point, you’ll need to know what’s important and what’s not, as well as what’s urgent and what isn’t. Effective people prioritize ruthlessly when allocating how they spend their time. For each task in my to-do inbox, I like to assign it a specific project, a priority, and if a deadline exists, a deadline.

These are the priorities I like to use:

1. Must do: Your most important tasks. The ones that will have the biggest impact on your future, have serious consequences if ignored, or simply give you the most anxiety. Tasks that offer a significant contribution toward the given goal you’ve defined belong to this priority. They are the big seeds you plant in the garden of your life.

2. Should do: Somewhat important tasks that have similar outcomes to must-do tasks, only to a much lesser degree. So although there are consequences if you ignore them, their ramifications are not apt to be life-altering or goal derailing. You really should complete them, but they aren’t as high in priority.

3. Nice to do: Actions with little impact and virtually no consequences. Most tasks in people’s to-do lists tend to be of the should-do and nice-to-do kind when examined closely. You can delete them or keep them in your system (perhaps in a Someday list); just don’t feel bad if you never get around to executing them. They don’t really matter.

If your software supports priorities, you might opt to simply use high priority, medium priority, and low priority, respectively. In Things, I have them as tags with an appropriate emoji prefixed to their name. This way it’s even easier to visually distinguish important tasks from not-so-important ones.

I will occasionally have doubts regarding whether a task belongs to one priority or another. In such a scenario, I assign the lower priority one to the task. If I don’t, it’s very easy to end up with everything being important on the list. Be selective and only assign Must do to tasks that are genuinely important.

I’ll note here that I don’t add artificial deadlines, because it can quickly become stressful to have countless due dates that aren’t really due dates become overdue. Instead, I only assign a due date/deadline if one genuinely exists. I leverage priorities and trust that important things will be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Some productivity experts like to use the Eisenhower matrix, popularized by the aforementioned Stephen Covey. So instead of having those three categories, we assign tasks to one of four possible quadrants of priority:

1. Quadrant I: Urgent and important tasks
2. Quadrant II: Important but not urgent
3. Quadrant III: Urgent but not important
4. Quadrant IV: Not urgent and not important

Covey suggested to tackle those things housed in Quadrant I if you have any, but really focus in a proactive manner on tasks in the second quadrant: tasks that are important before they become urgent. This way you’ll be more likely to lead a proactive, rather than reactive, life. He recommended delegating tasks from the third quadrant (after all, they aren’t important) as much as possible and completely deleting or disregarding Quadrant IV tasks.

This is certainly a valid alternative approach I’ve used with success in the past. If you choose to go for the simpler must-do, should-do, nice-to-do system instead, the presence of deadlines on selected tasks will still allow tasks that are urgent and important or conversely urgent but not important to emerge on a daily basis.

Your Daily Plan

We now have a huge list of tasks, assigned to the right projects/lists with the right degree of importance, and deadlines (if any exist). That’s great, but what should you work on next? That’s the question your to-do system should help you answer. So our next step is to have one meta task that repeats daily called Plan next day. You can also simply add it to your calendar as a reminder instead. But the idea is to dedicate some time each evening to plan for the next day.

The night before is ideal, as it gives your brain time to mentally prepare while you sleep, but the morning of can also work. Whenever you do it, on a daily basis you should select items from your to-do program and add them to your Today view. Depending on the program you are using, there might be a Today view available or you might have to use a custom list, star the tasks, or something else. Printing a sheet or writing them down with pen and paper works too. Essentially, create a daily plan that contains just the actions you intend to tackle on a given day.

In practice, this day plan should mostly have urgent tasks (of various degrees of importance) that can’t be delegated and must-do actions. Depending on how many must-do tasks you have in your system, should-do actions will also appear here frequently. Nice-to-do tasks shouldn’t appear too frequently, but you might find yourself in the mood to tackle a specific task even if it’s not that important. Flexibility is worthwhile, so don’t be afraid to include a few of those as well.

If you’re consistent, focusing on important tasks before they reach the point of becoming urgent will lead to far fewer urgent tasks down the road.

When it’s time to execute your tasks, focus on nothing else until urgent and must-do actions have been completed. I like the approach suggested by Brian Tracy in Eat That Frog! Give your most important task your full attention. In fact, reserve the most productive time of your day to it (whenever that is; for many people it’s during the morning hours, but there are plenty of night owls out there).

If your program allows you to do so, sort your Today view manually in the order of desired execution of the tasks, from most important to least important. In some cases, your context, such as where you find yourself at a given time, will affect your ability to execute certain tasks. So your order might not be precisely sorted by order of importance, but shoot for it.

Don’t touch should-do and nice-to-do items that might be on your daily plan until all urgent and must-do items for the day have been executed.

Stephen Covey had a great analogy for this concept. If you try to fill a jar with big rocks, pebbles, and sand, the order you choose matters. If you start with the sand (nice to do) and then the pebbles (should do) and only add the big rocks (must do) last, you may not be able to fit everything in the jar. Instead, if you start with the big rocks—what really matters in your life—you’ll find yourself able to jam in the pebbles and sand. And even if some sand is left out, it’s just nice-to-do stuff, so it won’t really matter.^[67]

Looking at every list in your to-do program every day as you plan your next day can be a lot of work if you have many tasks across a couple of dozen lists/projects. One way to solve this problem is to establish a weekly list as well (I tag such tasks as Sprint, to borrow from the SCRUM methodology nomenclature). Then, each day you select tasks from the shorter weekly list, rather than your entire huge to-do list. Every week, on Sunday, I review the tasks that were completed and assign new ones to the new sprint. Ideally, you should pull into this weekly list tasks from several projects so you can make consistent progress in various areas of your life.

Figure 13, ​Creating a to-do item in Things​, shows what a to-do item might look like in Things when adopting the Eisenhower matrix and this sprint approach.

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Figure 13. Creating a to-do item in Things

And speaking of reviews, I like to schedule a daily review as well, to reflect on the day, ensure tasks that were accomplished have been marked off as completed, journal, and so on. It’s basic maintenance that keeps the system up-to-date and something I can trust. In fact, I find that trusting the process is vital for this personal productivity approach to work.

That was a lot, but I found it to be a very good system to stay organized and keep up with the many responsibilities and demands in my life. On that note, I’d like to place the emphasis on the I. It’s what works for me. Feel free to adapt this system to your needs, your way of thinking, and the specific program you choose, if you don’t already have a system in place. Keep useful suggestions; discard the rest.