Craft your ideal todolist
O.K.M. Series - Organization 1
It may seem a very straight-forward organizational tool. Yet, the todolist is the core of my whole personal organization system. I find it so critical that, over the years, I have been continuously putting mine in question and asking myself how I could improve it.
The first thing I will say about todolists is that there is not one universal good way to hold one. The way you manage your todolist must be personal and adapted to your personal work and life style (this explains why so many different versions of todolist management software exist).
This being said, I still recommend applying some practical principles to enable an efficient and profitable use of personal todolists. I will explain those principles (and their benefits) as I tackle the two following issues:
Why do we need personal todolists?
How should we structure, manage and use our todolists?
(I may occasionally mention technical solutions that I have elected for myself. Please keep in mind that this is mostly for illustration purposes: what works for me may be very personal and not applicable to everyone).
Why do we need personal todolists?
The human brain’s short-term memory can only stock up to between 5 and 9 concepts at a time, and the more items you try to remember, the more energy your brain will consume doing so.
This explains why we can feel overwhelmed when having too many actions to manage at the same time. Such situation often leads to fatigue, unnecessary stress, and motivation loss.
Establishing a personal todolist will avoid you such inconvenience, as it frees your brain from the non-value added, energy consuming chore of remembering the actions you need to complete.
Additionally, fatigue, stress and personal biases can make your memory unreliable. Your todolist is particularly useful then, as it ensures that you do not forget any possibly critical task.
Besides, by giving you a clearer and better structured view of your workload, your todolist enables you to make fast and accurate decisions (for instance, selecting your priorities in the middle of a crisis situation).
Finally, holding a todolist also slightly boosts your motivation: the satisfaction of crossing tasks off actually constitutes a “gamification” of your progress, which makes you willing to accomplish more.
Choosing a relevant format
Todolists can take many forms: paper lists, white board, post-it notes, Excel sheet, flagged e-mail list, dedicated software and apps, etc.
It is best to choose a format that answers well to your personal requirements. For instance, if you travel often, storing your todolist on the white board of your office will obviously be unpractical.
I provide a very detailed guide of how to choose the best format for your todolist in “O.K.M. Series O2 — Choose your optimal todolist format”:
Structuring your todolist
Grouping tasks
I mentioned earlier that our brain’s short-term memory can only stock up to between 5 and 9 concepts at a time. However, This limitation can be overcome by grouping concepts into categories.
Our brains are much more efficient when apprehending groups of items rather than an unstructured list of those same items.
Hence, Structuring your tasks into categories makes it easier for your brain to conceptualize them. It gives you a clearer comprehensive view of your todolist, and facilitates any related decision making.
Task granularity
As I explain in “O.K.M. Series M1 - How to move a mountain”, I recommend breaking down your projects into as granular tasks as possible, in order to not let yourself be impressed or discouraged by their size.
With such an approach, the number of tasks your todolist comprises will quickly grow. Hence, grouping tasks into categories becomes even more essential.
You may use as many levels of groups, sub-groups, sub-sub-groups, etc. as you find relevant, as long as it does not degrade the readability of your todolist (This can become a matter of compromise. In that regard, being able to quickly expand/collapse task groups is very useful).
Task details
The details of a task are all the information that can be attached to a task, such as its expected completion date, its recurrence, the estimate workloads it represents, etc., and that can be formalized into a data field.
The diversity of details that you can input depends on the format of your todolist: you can store any information you want on paper or in an Excel file, but software-run todolists often impose you a given set of data fields.
Only store the details that you will use in a way that saves more time and energy than it takes you to input it. Try not to over complicate the task input, or you will risk losing motivation to keep your list up to date.
For instance, it makes sense to input the “Expected delivery dates” if you need to remember those, or if you wish to automatically sort your tasks by deadlines to identify your priorities. Oppositely, inputting information that you remember anyway and that you do not use in any automated computation is useless.
Using several todolists
Depending on the structure of your activity, you may want to split your todolist into several independent smaller ones to improve their individual readability.
Think beforehand of the consolidation operations that this will require.
For instance, if you need to estimate your current workload, how easy will it be to add the information from each task of each todolist? Can you generate automatically a consolidated list of all the tasks due prior to a given date?
Also, I recommend keeping the number of separate todolists reduced, as the energy required to manage each of them will add up.
Managing your todolist
Inputting tasks as soon as they appear
Inputting tasks as soon as they appear to you prevents your todolist from becoming obsolete. It reduces the risk that you forget a task between the time you acknowledge it and the time you store it.
No miracle solution here, you need to acquire the discipline by forcing yourself to input appearing tasks in your todolist until it becomes a reflex. You may reduce the effort that it requires by making your todolist as accessible and user-friendly as possible.
When in a rush or busy in a meeting at the time you need to input a task:
- If you have access to your todolist, try at least creating the task and giving it a temporary short name, without going into its details and without categorizing it.
- If you do not have access to your todolist, use a buffer (a piece of paper or anything else) to note down the task to add.
In both case you will have to complete your todolist later, but at least you are sure not to forget any task.
By the way, and although this may seem off topic, I recommend applying the same type of discipline with your personal calendar.
Establishing regular reviews
Regularly reviewing your todolist is essential for its good maintenance. It allows you to:
- Review and amend your todolist structure,
- Correct information that is not up to date anymore,
- Think of possible complementary tasks that you could add,
- Evaluate your workload, define bottlenecks and priorities.
To ensure that you do it, I recommend inputting “Todolist review” as a recurrent task within your todolist. The frequency of the reviews should be chosen based on how quickly changing your tasks and priorities are.
Using your todolist
Identifying tasks to input
Identifying tasks from the different stimuli that you receive in life and immediately inputting those in your todolist is a reflex to acquire. I define three types of tasks:
- Direct orders: tasks that you passively receive from a supervisor, or that are implied by a situation of strict necessity.
- Personal initiatives: tasks that you actively set for yourself after identifying an opportunity for improvement (anything from proposing to optimize an existing process to deciding to catch up with a friend).
- Ideas: personal development axis, business concepts, side projects, etc. that you would like to carry out in the future.
Ideas can be translated as tasks with no delivery date, or in a separate todolist. During your regular reviews, if you realize that you have some spare time, you may take the opportunity to select an idea for execution.
Doing so transforms your todolist into a creativity/innovation tool: by storing your ideas and reviewing them frequently, you can remember them, combine them, and you are more likely to undertake their realization.
“By Deadline” or “By Availability of Task” driven lists
Depending on the nature of your work, you can choose to sort tasks:
- By deadline: View your tasks by order of emergency. This format is relevant for deadline driven jobs and emergency situations.
- By availability: View your tasks as a “bucket” of available actions. This format is relevant for situations with less deadline pressure.
I find the “By availability” format more motivating, as it allows you to choose which action to carry out among a list: it leaves room for personal preference each time you want to pick up a new task.
Besides, the “By deadline” format tends to be less innovation-friendly. It pushes your ideas to the bottom of the list, which may reduce the likelihood of you undertaking their execution.
However, you are very likely to have deadlines, and you must not forget them. Be careful not to let your personal preference take over your actual priorities while choosing which actions to carry out.
Workload evaluation
You may use your todolist to detect situations when your workload makes it unrealistic to achieve your deadlines.
When such situation occurs, do not panic. There are two ways you can react:
- delegate some of the work or ask for help
- review your priorities and consider postponing least sensible tasks
If you have no choice but to postpone a deadline: at least by using your todolist, you are able to detect that necessity in advance, and to warn the related stakeholders as early as possible for them to have time to react.
Case study: my personal choice of structure
(UPDATE: I have moved to and would now recommend “Todoist” - https://todoist.com, which provides a very complete set of features for task management, as well as a community of users who keep improving the application).
I use a Google Tasks account that I synchronize in “Tasks Free”, a mobile application for Android. I defined 4 separate “By availability” driven todolists (I use the “Due date” field as an “Availability date” field):
- One general todolist, in which I input my “one-shot” tasks.
- One todolist dedicated to recurrent tasks. My recurrent tasks are significantly less critical than my “one-shot” tasks. Hence, it makes sense to separate them to improve the readibility of my general todolist.
- One todolist dedicated to personal development ideas (Learning a new skill or language, attending a training, etc.) as well as business ideas.
- One shopping list, that I update each time I notice being about to run out of an item. This way, I remember to buy replacement when I walk by the store.
In each todolist, I group tasks by categories. Occasionally I use sub-categories, but I try not to do it often as it degrades the readability of the whole list.
My todolist application automatically consolidates between the four todolists to produce a list of all available tasks, which are continuously being displayed as a grouped notification on my home screen. I can select an action from this list every time I wonder what to do next.
I review my todolist every Sunday (this action is registered as a recurrent task, in my second todolist). During reviews, if my workload allows it, I select an idea from the third todolist, move it to my first todolist, and tag it as available.
To conclude, I hope that the recommendations exposed in this article will have helped you to design a todolist which fits your needs and actually boosts your productivity on a daily basis.
Be conscious of the compromises that you have made when crafting your system. It is a good habit to re-examine them once in a while, and to put in question your whole process so that you can continuously fine tune it.
Thank you for reading! I welcome your feedback, so please feel free to react, comment, and recommend the article if you enjoyed it. Take care!
