Making a To-Do List That Works for You
I’ve been disorganized all my life.
As a child, I lost homework assignments and fell behind in school work because my area was always messy.
When it came time to move out of the house in my late teens, going through my closet to get rid of stuff was like Christmas. I didn’t want to get rid of anything because I hadn’t used anything yet. I forgot I even had it.
As a bachelor, I developed a system that works okay for a while if you aren’t really sharing your life with anyone: I just left mess piles where they were and always put things back into their proper mess piles when I was finished with them.
But when it came to practical things I needed to get done throughout the day? The week? The year? I was lost.
My temperament was such that I would get frantic, wanting to get everything done at once, often starting several things but not completing many of them. I lived a very stumble-around-with-one-pant-leg-on-while-trying-to-find-my-phone-charger kind of life.
I was always able to pay bills but I was often close to broke because I never got ahead where practical matters were concerned, like saving up for regular car maintenance or figuring out far in advance where I was going to live once my lease was up.
These are mostly trivial things a lot of young people struggle with, but I seemed to have trouble with just a tad bit more than other people I knew. Rather than being able to tackle day to day tasks that would free up my time, I found myself avoiding important tasks until the last minute. I built a prison of duty for myself, which made me overwhelmed, anxious and constantly on edge.
It wasn’t until late in life that I realized that very important desires I had and goals I wanted to reach were not being fulfilled or met. Nothing happened to me. No one else prevented me from doing what I wanted and needed to do. I just used my anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed as an excuse not to challenge myself or overcome my limitations. Ultimately, avoiding all kinds of tasks and activities made my life less confusing, but I wasn’t happy.
I knew that, rather than see it as a dichotomy between living with scatter-brained confusion or living simply but not aspiring to anything great, I needed to develop a path which would allow me to overcome my scatter-brained confusion and set me on course to fulfilling my goals, whilst allowing me the leftover time and space for living with that simplicity I so wanted but which, in prior circumstances, had been unfulfilling. There were things I wanted and my habits were getting in the way.
A clean home was important to me.
Making ends meet, paying off debt and being financially stable was important to me.
Writing was important to me. Creativity was important to me. Adventure was important to me. Friends were important to me.
Family was especially important to me when I got married and had a child. I needed a decisive break with my old habit patterns. I couldn’t be the best husband and father I could be if I didn’t have control over very basic parts of my life.
So what did I do?
‘Why don’t you write a list?’ people would tell me.
This was a no-brainer. But the problem was that each time I sat down to write a list, I found myself writing something which was pages long and included, not only everything that needed to get done during the day but everything that needed to get done during the week, the month and the year.
The size of the list was daunting and its mere presence ultimately served, not as an aid, but a reminder of the things which were weighing so much on my mind and stressing me out. It seemed like the list was saying, ‘Here I am, all the things you’re worried about in a physical form, all in one special place for you to look over and worry about.’
If you’re like me, you need a way of creating a list that is more effective and far less intimidating. You need something far more motivating. You need something that caters to your specific needs, your specific situation, your temperament. You need something which forms some communion with all of the nuances of your unique character.
You don’t need a list of things you have to do. You need a list that works for you.
First, we’ll get into the practical stuff, like determining what you need to get done. Then we’ll get to the also practical but more technical aspect of how you should get it done. Finally, we’ll get to the part where you give it that unique character that compliments the whole process and turns it into an engine for action.
What Needs to Get Done?
First, determine your most basic needs. Food, shelter, and safety. Write those three down. Do you have food? If you do, check it off. If you have shelter and safety, check those off.
Ask yourself if the way in which you have them is sustainable. Do you have a job which provides you enough money to buy food? Is your shelter a rented apartment or owned property? If you rent, how long are you planning to stay there? If you own, how much mortgage do you have left to pay?
If you don’t have any of these basic things, you have a little more work to do, but it’s totally possible. Keep your head up. Think about the quickest, safest way to get those basic needs taken care of. Go to a food shelter or a shelter for people in crisis. There are lots of resources out there for people who need to get on their feet. Write down your options and then act, act, act until you get them all knocked out.
Let’s assume you have your basic needs taken care of. But going back to the questions you asked yourself about your basic needs above, all kinds of tasks may stem from that. Perhaps you currently have a roof over your head, but your rent is going to increase exorbitantly once your lease is up in seven months. Maybe you have a job, but there was a mention of possible seasonal layoffs or you have a baby on the way and you’re just not making what you would like or need.
You find yourself simultaneously swamped with a million tasks: You have companies to call about bills, jobs to look for, car maintenance to figure out and mechanics to look up, degrees to finish, apartments to look up, real estate agents to research and personal projects to finish.
First, figure out which ones pertain to your basic needs. Then figure out which ones require some kind of specific deadline. Bills fall into this category. Write out a timeline of all the deadlines coming up.
You’ll ultimately end up with a list which resembles the one I mentioned earlier which I made for myself: one that is quite daunting and intimidating. This is a necessary first step.
It is painful to look at. Its mere presence taxes your very nerves.
Don’t panic. We’re still developing a strategy. This is early in the process. Pretty soon, you’re going to have a list that sings a song of victory each day you wake up and look at it, and it will sing all the louder as it shrinks in front of your eyes with each passing day.
How Does it Need to Get Done?
It’s easy to think of major tasks in your life as big monoliths you can’t approach without humiliation and unhealthy reverence. Realize that you often think about these tasks in abstract terms. Understand that what at first seems like a big task is actually a series of small tasks that are functionally quite easy and quick to take care of when you parse them out.
For instance, take a job search. A ‘job search’ seems like a big scary thing. It sits in your consciousness like a giant NFL player blocking your ATM with his arms folded. A ‘job’ is just an idea you have in your head. It isn’t a thing but a series of things — a network of things.
Of what does this network consist?
First of all, the type of work. Perhaps you’re looking for something in your field.
There is a pay scale to consider. You need to know how much money you need to live and you also need to know what the going rate is for a job like that.
There’s a way to get this kind of job. Maybe it requires a résumé. Maybe they do walk-in interviews or maybe it’s all online.
Develop a list specifically for this job search.
It might look something like this:
Edit résumé
Buy work clothes
Look up jobs in field
Fill out applications
Check in about applications
Now, if you have a lot of time on your hands, just maybe you’ll be able to knock all of this out in one day. If you’re like most people, however, you have a lot of other things going on. You also have to cook dinner, clean up the dishes, pick up your kid from school, etc.
Break the list up chronologically. Put the different tasks into time-categories based on what needs to get done first. Think of this as a next draft to your initial list. It might then look something like this:
Today:
Edit résumé
Look for jobs in the field
Near Future:
Fill out applications
Buy work clothes
Future:
Check in about applications
New things might get added to the list as developments in your plan occur. For instance, you could add to that last category, ‘Check back in with mike about an alternative position with Telecorp.’
Note that the names I gave to those chronological categories, such as ‘Today,’ ‘Near Future’ and ‘Future’ are more or less arbitrary. You can call them something different which suits your personality. You can even replace them with actual frames of time if you know when you have to complete a given task. For instance, ‘Near Future’ can be replaced with ‘This Week’ and ‘Future’ can be replaced with ‘Next 6 Months.’
Ultimately, the list will be re-drafted. You’ll move tasks in the ‘Future’ or ‘Next 6 Months’ category down to the ‘Near Future’ or ‘This Week’ category once their deadlines get closer. Or perhaps something in the ‘Next 6 Months’ category only has abstract existence, such as ‘Routine car maintenance,’ but it will be parsed out into several different tasks like, ‘lookup mechanics’ and ‘compare price points’ once it reaches the ‘Today’ part of the list.
The nice thing about parsing things out like this is that you don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to do more than you’re physically able to do in one day. You also have mini-lists within the bigger list which frees up psychological clutter and allows you to actually witness progress happening before your eyes. The good feeling you get from getting the mini-lists done will create a positive feedback loop which will give you the momentum to tackle everything else and redraft the bigger list as needed.
The example I gave you above deals with one task. Ultimately, you’re list is going to take care of all tasks. Now that you’ve grasped the basic concept, you can try the same method on other things.
Take looking for an apartment. Your list might look like this:
Look up apartments in my area
Call about rates/schedule walk-through
Compare prices
You know what you need to do, but you can’t get all of it done in one day. You’re also looking for a job. So you end up parsing it out all together like this:
Today:
Edit résumé
Look up apartments in my area
Look for jobs in my field.
Near Future:
Fill out applications
Buy work clothes
Call about apartment rates/schedule walk-through
Compare rates
Future:
Check back in about applications
Again, I can’t stress the importance of taking something in a later category and stripping it down to its bare essentials. Try to turn each task into as many smaller tasks as possible. This will help you prioritize your time and figure out what you have it within your power, energy and time to do. Try to turn ‘Buy work clothes’ into ‘Lookup deals on work clothes’ and ‘Compare work clothing prices.’
You may find that you can do one in a day but not the other, and that’s okay. You’re knocking out a bunch of other needed tasks alongside it. You’ll look around and you’ll have a freshly edited résumé, clean dishes, dinner for the evening, and a few leads on a new place to live.
My last example showed you a way to parse out two tasks, but ultimately, as I said before, you’ll be able to include many tasks and place each part of the task in its respective chronological category.
Finally, we’re going to talk about giving your to-do list that that extra bit of character will make it flow naturally with your life and will actually make you excited to get things done.
Make It Yours
My example was just that: an example. You can use it if you like, but you will have to figure out what works for you.
You might need six chronological categories and you can call them whatever compliments your psychological profile. Maybe you have categories like:
Today
Near Future
Future
Far Future
When I’m Retired
Have fun with it. Remember as well that this list is a working process. It’s going to change a lot from day to day as you reconfigure it and re-situate certain tasks. Figure out what tools you need in order to make this part as easy as you can possibly make it.
For instance, if you’re a notebook person, you’ll want an entire notebook. Essentially, you’re going to be rewriting your list every day and using the previous day as a partial template. Ideally, you’re ‘Today’ section is never going to be the same, and likewise, things from your ‘Near Future’ section, as I said before, will trickle down, even if they split off into more than one task in your ‘Today’ section. It’s as though all of your tasks are slipping down the drain and disappearing.
Personally, I like to use my phone. I have a note-taking app I use which makes it easy to copy-and-paste the parts of the list I need to put in different places. I start a new file for each day. This allows me to go back through if I need a reference point and see what I completed on what day.
Again, do what works for you, but I do have a few suggestions in the way of nuanced methods to make all of this more agreeable and complimentary to your mental wellbeing.
Personally, I don’t like crossing things off the list. I highlight them. The default color some people might want to use to cross off or highlight would be red or yellow. I highlight completed tasks with blue. Red and yellow are so aggressive as if to say that the task is your enemy and you have rightfully killed it. I’d rather not engage with activities in my life this way, so I use blue, which has the emotional effect of making the task seem like a wonderful thing which is no longer in need of doing but which has been absorbed into the calm flow of my life. Hear what I’m saying: I’m not saying don’t use red or yellow. I’m just saying those colors don’t work for me, specifically. Use what is agreeable to you.
Now, there are some ways that you can really enhance this whole process that I would highly recommend. Maybe this is all overwhelming and you’ll want to stick to the basic method at first, but I would highly recommend doing the following:
Have a separate section of your list where you write, not what you have to do, but what you actually did which was not on the list. Personally, I like to write this part in green, which signals to me that this is all stuff that comes naturally and just happens on its own. It might look like this:
Ate breakfast with the family
Goofed around on Twitter
Read a Medium article
Watched YouTube videos on Taoism
Cleaned dishes
After a few days, as you’re looking over your lists to track your overall progress on everything else and augment the positive feedback loop you’ve created by being such a productive badass, spend some time looking at this particular portion of the list. Look at it very carefully, kindly and subtly, but also clinically.
Don’t beat yourself up but pull no punches. Did you waste too much time on social media? Watching Netflix shows? Try to cut those out of your day in the coming days. As you’re writing this stuff down, you’ll be able to see it diminish. When I’ve done this in the past, I’ve seen a direct correlation between diminishing junk activity and completing much-needed tasks at a more efficient rate.
But be sure to focus on the positive as well.
Is there something you found yourself doing which wasn’t on the list which adds a tremendous amount of value to your life?
Figure out a way to incorporate more of this into your life. Add it to your list. Turn it into a goal rather than something that just happens every now and then, about which you can say, ‘Wasn’t that nice?’
If you’re a romantic person, maybe you’ll want to mostly hide your list. Your spouse might find it and find out you’re saving up to take her/him to Paris.
Again, give your growing list your own character. Don’t take what I’m saying as gospel. Maybe you think the highlighting thing is corny and you want more sensuality. Maybe you’re the kind of person who rubs certain fragrances on love letters. Do that to your list. Put scents on your list which make you feel alive or calm and serene.
Turn your list into a magical or meditative practice. As you’re writing it out, put on some relaxing music. Do whatever you need to do to get the results you need, to make it feel less like work and more like what it is: the simple flow of life — one moment leading into the next with no real break.
Conclusion
This may seem like a lot of work at first, but the entire point is that, in the end, you will be saving yourself work and time. I would love for you to optimize your time and your energy so that you can free up psychological clutter, get things done, accomplish your dreams and have peace of mind in matters big and small.
Hopefully, I gave you something of use. There is no substitute for action, in the end, but figuring out the best way for you to develop a to-do list is a good first step to start organizing your life around making it far better than it was before. In time, you will learn from the discipline and focus this process instilled in you and maybe you won’t even need it in the future. Maybe that discipline will carry over into other parts of your life.
In the end, this advice is similar to most advice in the face of giant tasks. Start small. The smallest step leads to the greatest leap.
