Rewriting our To-dos

The modern workplace has experienced a redefinition. The new wave of the so-called ‘work-life balance’ and the various social media applications have caused a stream of distractions while working — a quick 2-minute Instagram scrolling, a funny YouTube video, that viral article, and many more.

While breaks are important and serve our productivity better, distracted breaks have now started taking our attention away from a continuous flow at work.

Enter: To-dos and Reminder apps

Not just distractions, but to-dos and reminder apps help us complete our allotted tasks and projects in time. They ensure we do not ‘forget’ the work that we have to do, and reduce our distractions. My reminder list on any day is filled to the very last line on my phone.

The reminder list image is just my reminder list for the weekend.

Apps and systems have become more intuitive in understanding that we have some tasks that are daily, some weekly, some monthly, and some just for in the moment.

Reminder apps are now designed to meet this requirement better — sending you daily, weekly, monthly notifications.

Apps are also trying to induce habits into our lives by increasing their offerings. They now try to convert our to-dos into daily habits, and basically push us towards looking at our to-dos more from a daily point of view and less from a task perspective.

They try to gamify the experience by gratifying our achievements and running streaks, badges, or point systems.

However, these apps are only making an effort at wanting to make us use them more, and not use them more efficiently. Some of them have made the everyday to-dos or reminders into a herculean task, taking away the ease behind their purpose. A reason why you eventually see most people go back to their preinstalled reminder app on the phone.

There is also a growing dependence upon such to-dos as over-management and over-organising is a trend as well — planners, reminder apps, notes, post-its, emailers, etc.

Once we become over-dependent on to-dos, it becomes difficult to do anything new or beyond our allotted tasks. We start dividing all our time between the to-dos only.

Eventually, we will not have learnt or experimented more and just worked on the mechanical tasks that get the job done. Maintaining these to-dos and reminders become a to-do in itself(one productivity app actually has a ‘Write to-do list’ as its task).

Exit: The conventional To-dos and Reminder apps

Stop looking at your to-dos the way you currently do.

An interesting way to maintain your to-dos at work is by maintaining a short, if not exhaustive, list of your colleagues’ to-dos. This will also help you understand what takes them to do their job better.

For instance, imagine you’re a strategist and you know that the designer’s to-do for the day is designing the website homepage. This will make you understand how the designer designs the homepage from scratch — how does she reference, what are the various websites she takes inspirations from, what software does she design on, what are the various things to keep in mind while designing, how much effort goes into each and a lot more! This way the next time you’re at a strategy meeting, you will also have points of view on the design process, and what it entails.

Make your to-do a forever mindset — do not restrict yourself to your job or role! A person does not become the CEO of a company or manages his or her company by just doing one role. If you believe your to-do is supposed to elevate your efficiency, you need to start understanding that your improved efficiency must allow you to learn more about your own skills and other skills. Only then will you truly become more ‘efficient’ and productive.

Add a new activity — sketching, reading, designing, watching a new show, or exercising as part of your daily to-do.

But write it down daily for more conviction and commitment to the task. From what I have noticed, there’s a risk of the daily reminder becoming a blindspot. Even apps are not innovating their notifications as I have written before thus making following them not mentally rewarding.

Also, don’t look at final deadlines only while forming your to-dos. Break down your tasks for that project to understand what will help you meet that deadline while still working on more things on the side. A famous Parkinson theory in psychology states that work expands to fill time. Meaning: if you have 5 days, you will most often work aggressively on the 4th and 5th days only. Instead, spread it amongst all days so that you are not ‘doing one project only’. That is another risk to-dos give rise to.

The focus is so singularly on one project at a time that for months on end you end up working on one project only. If you at least know what your colleague is doing, you are involved, even if minutely, in more than just one project or task.

Sometimes, breaks at work become interaction with colleagues about their work and their skills this way.

My senior colleague has recently suggested we flip roles for a day with any other team member, thus learning the responsibilities of a new role. I am excited about this exercise because while I am spending time learning the responsibilities and tricks of different roles, this time I will directly be executing a different skill.

Learning becomes more fun when you can practically execute your knowledge, thus completing the full circle.