The Care and Feeding of To-Do Lists
The humble to-do list can be a marvelous thing.
As a reference repository for your resolutions, a to-do list can be part of an “external mind.” Referring to it can remind you of intended actions you might have otherwise forgotten. And creating it can allow you to blissfully “forget” your to-dos for the time being. When you outsource and offload your to-dos to a reliable external mind, your internal mind can let it go, freeing up space for other things.
A to-do list can augment your will as well as your memory. Research has shown that actions are easier to perform when they have been “pre-decided,” especially in a well-articulated, highly specific way.
Deciding is mentally demanding and draining. If it’s the end of a long day, and you’re experiencing what psychologists call “decision fatigue,” you may not have the neural firepower to decide what actions needs to be done or which actions, of all the myriad actions possible, to do next.
Under those conditions, a to-do list can be a lifeline for your productivity, pulling you out of the mire of idleness and torpor by providing you a finite selection of pre-decided, pre-thought-out actions that you can just “crank through” without having to exert too much willpower or thinking power.
A to-do list can be a grab bag of “easy wins” that can help you gamify your day and build a sense of accomplishment and momentum.
However, a to-do list can also be a not-so-marvelous thing. It can be something that just stresses you out when you look at it, so you look away or avoid looking at it in the first place.
As David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, wrote:
You are either attracted or repelled by your lists and everything on them. There is no neutral territory. When you look at any one item you will either be thinking to yourself, “Hey, when can I mark THAT off?” or “Yuck! Back away!”
The difference comes down to how well you create and tend to your list. With proper care, your list can be as inviting as a well-tended garden. If neglected, it will become as forbidding as a dark and thorny thicket.
If you find your to-do lists repulsive rather than attractive, you may need to weed and cultivate them. Here’s how to start.
First of all, you need to weed out any ambiguity in the list items. An item that says something vague like “anniversary” doesn’t belong on a to-do list. That’s because you can’t do an anniversary. You can only do an action related to it, like calling a restaurant to make a reservation for your anniversary dinner with your wife. You need to clarify exactly what that action is before you can do it.
If you’re mentally fresh and ready to clarify ambiguous things, then a reminder like “anniversary” might be enough to prompt action, because you could clarify the next action on the spot and then do it. But if you’re not so fresh, and if you’re in “doing” mode rather than “thinking” mode when you refer to your to-do list, seeing an item like that might just confuse and repel you.
A list of reminders of mere subjects will be ambiguous and forbidding. To make your list inviting, you need to make it a proper to-do list by translating those subjects into actions. Reminders of subjects can be useful to jot down, but those belong in an inbox, not a to-do list, as I explained in a recent essay on Medium.
Let’s say you add “Call restaurant to make reservation” to your to-do list, but you haven’t actually decided which restaurant to go to. Later, if you’re looking for clear guidance on things to do, that item might just stymie you, because you can’t do it yet. To make it an inviting reminder, you need to clarify not only an action, but the next action, which in this case might be to discuss the restaurant choice with your wife.
A truly inviting to-do list will be populated only by next action reminders. That’s why David Allen, instead of “to-do lists,” uses the term “next actions lists.”
