In this episode we explore how ‘to-do lists’ do help some to get things done, but why it’s more problematic for others
I’m back in the cafe - my usual safe place - and there’s a woman there on the next table who’s busy writing in her journal. We chat, briefly. Is she another writer, I ask? “Oh no”, she says; “I’m making lists. I write my to-do lists, you see: if it’s not on the list, it doesn’t get done!”
Well, yeah, ‘getting things done’ is not really my strong point, is it? To be honest, I dither, a lot, for way too much of the time. And then I have often intense periods, sometimes quite long, where I finally wake up, work absolutely flat out, way too long, way too hard, way too many all-nighters and all that, and promptly run into burnout. Either way, Not A Good Idea…
Maybe making lists might be a better way to do it? Actually, I do make lists, sort-of - great sprawling linear mind-maps, sometimes. The catch is that, as usual, I’m trying to take on too much: my current ‘Tasks’ mindmap lists eighteen books that I currently have on the go, and that’s just some of what I’m trying to work on at present. (In part because, yeah, at my age I’m trying to get everything finished before I’m no longer able to do so - yet the new ideas keep on coming anyway…) The obvious result, though, is that, yeah, not much does actually get done, finished, out of the door - not least because I’m switching between tasks so much and so often that my attention-span gets sliced into ever smaller and smaller pieces. Again, Not A Good Idea…
The other problem is that those lists are too coarse-grained, each item on the list just way too large in scope. It’s not a list of what to do today, but what to do this year, this decade, this century. And then there’s the opposite problem with lists that are too fine-grained, as in so many of those classic ‘time-management’ techniques such as the Pomodoro method: I end up spending more time futzing around with the list than in doing any of the actual tasks. Once again, Not A Good Idea…
So what is A Good Idea on this? Where is the right balance? Is there one? I don’t know.
Okay, yes, I know some people do indeed work well with making lists, and that doing so does indeed help them to Get Things Done. And for a lot of people, there’s real satisfaction in ticking the box and being able to say “Yeah, that’s done!” For me, though, that tends to happen only at very small scale: individual items on a shopping-list, for example, on the rare occasions when I remember to write that list and also remember to bring it with me when I go to the shops. I do keep a sort-of calendar-type list for events that I need to remember, and I do indeed mark those as ‘DONE’ where that actually happens - but that’s typically less than a dozen items each month, which is very different from the daily to-do lists that I see so many others use.
Part of this could be a writer’s issue, perhaps? A post like this one rarely gets done in one go: the initial idea may come up on one day, the anchoring image for it on another, and the text itself written in variously-short stop-and-start sessions over several days, threaded in with everything else that’s going on over that time. And a book, of course, gets built over months, sometimes years. For non-fiction, the outline is a kind of list, the chapter-structure is a kind of list-within-a-list, and the whole thing is usually done in step-by-step fashion; so yes, that does sort-of match up with the making lists metaphor. But fiction - particularly the series-fiction I’m working on right now - well, that’s a very different beast: chapters usually get written piecemeal, in almost random order, and whole chapters can sometimes get moved to a different book in the series. Sure, I can (and do) list the books themselves, as a giant-scale ‘to-do’ list; but even that list can change over time, and the joy of ticking the box in that list and saying ‘Yeah, that’s done!” is a rare luxury that happens perhaps only a couple of times a year even if I’m doing well. For me, lists like that act more a reminder of day-by-day failure rather than a symbol of success…
Perhaps I’m not good at using lists because I’d learnt long ago, back in the business world, to beware of goals and targets and the like. And yet, really, that’s what lists are for: every list-item makes the future completion of that item into a kind of goal. The reason why I became wary about that was because the emphasis so easily shifts from ‘doing the task’ to ‘reaching the goal’, whether or not the task is done well, or even at all. And so often that old phrase really does apply: that the journey itself, the exploration, is actually more important than reaching the destination. So for me, at least, yes, something as simple as a shopping-list can be useful, but others sometimes, well, you know, just kind of get in the way of what really matters? Something like that?
For example, many people make ‘bucket-lists’, lists of things that they want to have done before they die. But it’s so easy to get so focussed on that list that we miss what else is happening along the way - all those even-more-interesting things that Reality Department is trying to show us? And what happens if we do complete every item on the bucket-list? - are we supposed to drop dead on the spot once we get there? Or lose all meaning completely, now stuck in a life without purpose? The bucket-list is such an odd idea, in some ways…
For me these days, I suppose, there’s really only one list that matters any more, and even then that list consists of exactly one item:
contribute whatever I can towards a more fair, equitable and sustainable world
Sure, as you’ll have seen here often over the past couple of years, there are several subsidiary items in that list, though in reality they’re all part of the same one item. For example, these would include:
eradicate entirely everything about the money-economy and its disastrous possession-obsessed consuming of the world, and instead replace it with an economics and politics built around mutual interlocking responsibilities
put an end to paediarchy, and keep the covert-crybabies and their ilk well away from any positions of power
put an end to lying-for-profit , and instead make honesty a valued virtue again
put an end to profiting from war - and preferably put an end to war itself
…just to name a few of the more important items there. The catch, of course, is that whilst it’s a list, it’s not really a to-do list in the normal sense, and there’s no way I could achieve any of those items on my own, which in some ways makes it kind of pointless as a personal list. But yeah, do what I can, anyway - such as writing here, and working on whatever small changes I can find that might help in some way towards those aims. Oh, and there’s one other item that needs to be there, for me, for others, for everyone, though it’s not a goal-like item as such:
have fun whilst doing any and all of the above
If we’re making lists, that’s one list-item that definitely matters, and needs to be in every list!
So where does this exploration leave us? As I see it, to-do lists and the like do seem to work quite well with things that are simple, predictable, certain, step-by-step and that have known (or at least knowable) end-points or outcomes. But if any of those attributes are missing - and particularly, as happens in so much of my own work, when all of them are missing, where the task is not-simple, not-predictable, not-certain, not-step-by-step, unknown end-point and all that - then, yeah, maybe not so much. In many cases, such as in those vast, tangled, multi-item mindmaps of mine, about all that I can do is merely list the names of the items themselves - which isn’t much help in actually getting those items done. Oh well.
That’s my experience of the usefulness-or-not of making lists, anyway. What’s yours?
Hi Tom, a "to-do" list is the first thing I spend time on in the morning, what i do though is to prioritize the list which can be done by due date, recipient etc.. any new items which arrive during the day are added at the bottom of the list and prioritised the next morning if they are not more important than the current task. This will always ensure that you are working on the most important item in your to-do list.
May not work for everyone, but it works for me.