Problems With to Dolists

This week’s question is on the humble to-do list and how to get the best out of using one.

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Episode 198 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 198 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Have you noticed that your to-do list isn’t very good at helping you to get things done? It’s a great way to remind you of all the things you haven’t done and how much you have to do, but motivating you to do the tasks? No. Not very good at all. 

This week, I have a question on this very topic and I can’t wait to answer it for you. 

Now, before we get to the question, if you want to receive a time management and productivity tip every week, then sign up for my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and it contains a list of all the content I produced that week, a short article on productivity, time management, or goal planning, and links to articles and videos I have found interesting that week. It’s like getting your very personal weekend newspaper digitally every week. No negative news or politics. Just straightforward helpful tips and tricks to help you on your continuous journey to self-improvement. 

Details on how to sign up for my newsletter are in the show notes. 

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks; Hi Carl, I’ve been using a to-do list for years but have always struggled with it. I’m very good at adding tasks and stuff, the problem I have is I just ignore the list altogether on most days. I don’t want to go there and look at all the stuff I have to do. It leaves me feeling stressed and anxious. How do you make your list inspiring? 

Hi Ben, thanks for your question. 

Firstly, I should reassure you that you are doing nothing wrong. I’ve met a lot of people who have found the same problem with a to-do list. They can be very demotivating and uninspiring. 

When we make the decision to start a to-do list it can be exciting. It can also be stress-relieving to get all those tasks and to-dos out of our heads and into an external place. The trouble is that stress relief rarely lasts very long at all. Once we have everything out of our heads, all that’s happened is all those things that were swimming around causing us stress and anxiety are now staring at us from a computer screen or a piece of paper so the stress relief is short-term. 

Now, the number one problem with to-do lists is what we put on them. There is a belief that everything needs to go on the list. Well, yes and no. You see a lot of the things we put on our lists are the kind of things we are not going to forget anyway. They have their own natural triggers. For instance, taking the garbage out. The trigger here is you get to see how full your trash can is every time you walk past it. Do you really need a reminder for that? 

Email is another example. A lot of our tasks come from email and so it’s natural to feel we must send actionable emails to our to-do list. Makes sense doesn’t it? I mean, the email contains a task and tasks should go onto a to-do list. 

The problem here is all you’ve done is moved a task from one place to another place and done nothing about it. You’ve shuffled the proverbial paper, which might give you a small sense of accomplishment when in reality you’ve accomplished zero. Nothing.

With email, you can create folders So all you need to do is create a folder for all your actionable emails. I advise my clients to create a folder called “Action This Day”, and any email that needs something doing with it—a reply, reading, or adding to a project note, for instance—goes into that folder. 

Then, either once or twice a day, give yourself some time to clear that folder. I recommend you reverse the order of the mail in that folder so that the oldest email is at the top and the latest at the bottom. This helps to stop you from cherry-picking the easiest emails and forces you to deal with the oldest email first. That way you will always be up-to-date with your mail. 

You can create a task in your to-do list reminding you to clear this folder once a day if you wish, but the reality of our modern life is email and messages from places like Slack need dealing with every day, so scheduling time for this makes more sense. For me, I schedule an hour a day for dealing with my communications in my calendar. It’s got to be done every day anyway. Time for replying to email won’t magically appear. You have to make time for doing it. 

For some of you, much of your work may involve following up with clients and customers and it seems logical to add all these follow-ups into your to-do list. Again, this can create overwhelm. Now depending on your work and how many of these you have to do each day you could create a dedicated list for calls and follows up in your task manager. But, if a lot of your work does involve calls, I would create a spreadsheet that I can work from every day. This way I can add notes dates when I called when I should follow up and anything else relevant to that person. 

This again means you can replace individual tasks with a single task telling you to complete your calls for the day. It also means all your information is in one place which means if your boss asked you about a particular client or customer you can easily retrieve that information. 

A functioning to-do list acts as a central hub directing you towards the work that needs doing. A to-do list stops functioning when it becomes clogged up with a large number of low-value tasks that crowd out your important work. 

We, humans, are hard-wired to pick the low-hanging fruit. If you have three tasks two of which are simple tasks like call your colleague to check they received a file you sent a couple of days ago or look into buying a new laptop computer, and one task to work on a presentation you need to do early next week, you will pick the call and laptop research first. That gives you two checks instead of one but it doesn’t move anything important forward. That’s just the way we are. 

We have to be much stricter about what gets onto our daily to-do lists if we want them to direct us towards the important tasks. One way to do that is to separate your routine tasks—the clearing of actionable emails, following up with colleagues and clients, and doing your expenses—from our project and goal tasks. One way to do that is to create a folder for your routine tasks and set a recurring date for each one for when they need to come up. That way you won’t need to review that folder very often and these low-value tasks will come up when they need to come up in your daily list. 

You also want to make sure these tasks fall to the bottom of your daily lists by using tags or flags. Most good task managers allow you to flag tasks and these will show up at the top of your list, so make sure your high-value tasks are at the top of your list and the low-value ones are at the bottom. 

The next step is to make sure you do a daily and weekly planning session. Daily planning sessions should be done before you end the day before. The weird thing about these daily planning sessions is almost everyone knows it makes sense. It’s a good practice and it sets you up for a very meaningful and productive day. You get better sleep because you are not worrying about missing anything and you feel a lot more in control of what needs to be done. Yet, most people skip it. 

I’m too tired, I don’t want to be thinking about work in the evening or I don’t have time, are just three of the excuses I often hear. Yet, you’re too tired and you feel you don’t have time precisely because you didn’t have a plan for the day and you ended up working to everyone else’s plan. And if you think avoiding doing the daily plan will stop you from thinking about work in the evening, you’re gravely mistaken. You’ll be worrying about all the things you think you might have forgotten all evening. 

If you really want to feel less tired and not worry about what you might have missed at work, do the daily planning session. You only need ten minutes or so. Clear your inbox to make sure there are no fires developing there, check your calendar for your appointments, and review your to-dos for the next day to make sure they are still relevant—it’s surprising how many things you thought you might have to do three weeks ago no longer need doing. 

One final point for you, Ben, is to know your limitations. There are only a small number of meaningful things we can do each day. For most people that will be around ten things. Now, this doesn’t include some of the less meaningful tasks and routines such as putting fuel in your car, checking email, and doing your food shopping, these are meaningful tasks that drive your projects and goals forward. 

If you think you are going to put together a one-hour presentation, attend five meetings and write an outline for a new company training programme as well as contact ten clients, get an hour at the gym and cook a romantic meal for your partner, good luck. It isn’t going to happen. Get realistic. 

One of the strengths of the Time Sector System is it gets you to focus on what you want to accomplish in a week, not in a day. While the saying goes ‘most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade’, the same principle applies to the day and week. We do tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can accomplish in a week. Focus on what you want to achieve in the week. 

This means you don’t want to skip the weekly planning session either. This is around thirty minutes at the end of the week where you can get a big picture view of where you are with your goals and projects. You can then set yourself targets of achievement for the week. See what needs moving forward and look for the small wins that, over time, add up to big wins. 

If you want your to-do list to work for you, reduce what you have on there and ensure what is on your to-do list are meaningful tasks that drive goals and projects forward. Be realistic about what you can do, and do your daily and weekly planning. 

I hope this has been helpful for you, Ben. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.