When To-Do Lists Stop Working
Don’t get me wrong, I love making to-do lists and using tools to manage tasks, but do most of them work in the long run?
There are well designed apps out there we can use and sometimes sticky notes do just fine for many of us. If you are a student, working professional, or a busy parent, having a reminder list keeps you on track.
Many people think that to-do lists are valuable because they are a centralized place to store tasks.
When you break down even the most complicated workflow management tools used in enterprise, they are also fundamentally to-do lists.
We’ve spent decades reinventing how the task list should look like, how it should feel like, and what people need to enter into each field. However, we haven’t stopped to think about what makes a to-do list successful.
Harvard Business Review and Forbes have provided some insights into why to-do lists stop working. I wanted to focus on the 2 fundamental roadblocks to success whether you are using a to-do list in your personal life or a more complex task management system at work.
To-Do Lists don’t work the moment you stop creating/updating tasks.
This isn’t some profound insight that is supposed to blow you away. It’s pointing out something very obvious that most of us overlook. Let’s get real. Unless you are a diligent individual who is OCD about creating and updating tasks regularly, your to-do list will eventually go stale.
I remember in college when I opened a Word Doc to track my daily tasks on August 22nd. That doc remained open till May 5th when the academic year finished. I was that obsessed with tracking everything I did. It was a daily ritual, a habit I couldn’t let go. It was also an immense investment of time. Something felt incomplete if I didn’t have my tasks organized for the day when I woke up.
As a product person, it also made me sad to see that not many tools out there could streamline this process. I would have loved to transform messages from conversations into tasks and have an intelligent assistant suggest what I needed to do or have on my to-do list.
To-Do Lists aren’t valuable if you aren’t executing.
Remember that satisfying feeling you get when you cross something off from a list. We need more of that. Yet, our to-do lists end up becoming a long cluttered mess over time. You look at it occasionally but are not really using it to go and complete a task. Why maintain a task list for the sake of having something you are not acting upon?
Organization for the sake of organization that doesn’t lead to an progress is a waste of time. Instead of you spending all that time making the to-do list, spend it on executing tasks as they come up. I can understand that you need to plan and prioritize and seeing a full list is helpful, but don’t get stuck in the planning phase forever.
Interestingly, there are tasks on my list I wish I could just delegate to someone else to complete. Simple errands like booking flight tickets, reserving a table at a restaurant, or buying something on Amazon. I want my to-do list to make me successful by helping me execute.
I love productivity and products that actually make me efficient. I wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on what prevents us from being successful at using some sort of task management system. It proved to me that we need to change the current paradigm around to-do lists so that they are smarter and more practical for busy people.
Krish is a Founder @ Fireflies.ai where we are using intelligent systems to automate project and task management on Slack.
