How to Organize Your ToDo List
The best way to organize your ToDo list is to combine all your ToDo Lists into one supreme list so you can get a handle on everything you have to do.
Don’t believe me? See if any of these list management methods sounds like you…
The Hybrid: one list on your phone and one list on paper
The Wall: one list at home and one list at work
The Kiddie Table: one list for everything else and a separate one for the kids
The Masquerade: you kludge your calendar into functioning like a list
The Jellybean Jar: some things are on lists, everything else is in your head
If you’re using any of these methods, I bet things are falling through the cracks, deadlines are being missed and you always have a vague feeling when you commit to something that you might be making a promise you can’t keep.
If you’re looking for a better way, (and I assume you are since you’re reading this post) I’ve got a well researched idea for you….
Get rid of all of them except one.
The best way to organize your ToDo list is to only have one list with everything on it, and here are five reasons why:
- One list reduces cognitive load.
- One list can help drive balance between the personal and the professional.
- One list keeps you from overcommitting.
- One list reduces the chance things will fall through the cracks.
- One list can help make you more efficient.
1. One ToDo list reduces cognitive load.
Cognitive load is a concept that describes how much stuff we can carry around in our heads at any one time. It relates to working memory (I have a doctors appt at 2pm today) rather than long term memory (multiplication tables). It turns out that our working memory has an extremely limited capacity. That’s one of the reasons we make lists in the first place. It allows us to get items out of our working memory into a place where we can access them later. Then we don’t have to remember all the items on the list we just have to remember “list”.
But when we have more than one list, in more than one place or we don’t make lists then we are really straining our working memory. We’re making it carry more than it needs to because we have to keep remembering that there are multiple lists, that we need to check them, that we need to add things to them if they’re not readily available.
2. One ToDo list can help drive balance between the personal and the professional.
One you, one list. This may not have worked if you worked at a big corporation, but this is your company now. Merge your professional list and your personal list. Trying to keep both parts of your life completely separate is an interesting theory, but as an entrepreneur I’ve found that to be unrealistic. The work life seeps through to the personal and if you have a partner and children, the personal life percolates up to the work. You’ll make it a lot easier for yourself if you acknowledge that the two are intertwined and manage your priorities across both.
3. One ToDo list helps keep you from overcommitting.
Part of managing Overwhelm is being clear about both your personal and professional goals. (If you haven’t set a clear, countable business gaol yet, here’s how.) Let’s say one of your personal goals is to train for a 5K, another is to be at all your son’s baseball games and your work goal is to double the size of the company.
So at the beginning of the year, you put together a training schedule for yourself, you put all the baseball games on the calendar and you write down the initiatives that you believe will grow the company. If these are all on separate lists, but not considered together, there’s going to come a time when you’re supposed to do a long run, there’s an away game and you have a can’t miss milestone for the new product all in the same week. And the stress that comes from making the decisions about what gets priority is only going to add to your Overwhelm.
But if you consider them all together, you might decide to amend some of your goals from the beginning or at least you might consider not launching the product during baseball season.
4. One ToDo list reduces the chance things will fall through the cracks.
A sure sign to myself that I’ve taken on too much is that I start dropping balls. A missed doctors appointment. Forgetting to call a friend on their birthday. Missing the registration window for a meeting I really wanted to attend. Usually it happens because I’ve gotten really wrapped up in my work and for whatever reason, I started keeping the home list in my head. And then I feel like a bad mom or a bad friend and it just adds to the Overwhelm. When this starts happening, I definitely find it’s reassuring to put all the things on one list and then I can start to make a plan of how to manage the tsunami.
5. One ToDo list can make you more efficient.
I’m a bigger fan of monotasking than multitasking, but here’s a place I’ll make an exception. When you have everything on one list, sometimes you can group the personal and the professional. For instance, when I’ve got an hour blocked off for admin tasks, I definitely blend the two. I’ll set up a business coffee and add work appointments to the calendar in the same block as I make a dentist appointment or send an email to a child’s teacher. That’s part of the power of protecting time so it’s there for whichever part of your life needs it.
Ready to take action on the best way to organize your ToDo list?
I hope this post convinces you to write everything down on one list. But I’m also thinking that once you consolidate, your list is going to be long and well, overwhelming. But stick with me. Next week’s post is going to be about getting that list under control. I’ve got your back on this. I promise.
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