Many of us use To Do lists to keep track of our immediate and future tasks, some maintain it more religiously than others; some rely on it much more than others. Generalizing, To Do lists are known to be a good practice to follow and provides many benefits, some of which being:
- Provides clarity on how much workload you are under and should expect in the near future
- Streamline your activities and reduce randomization
- Can also be used to act as a repository of completed tasks which can be useful when you are trying to review the work you have done with your manager
- Allows prioritization of work
Given all these benefits that To Do lists provide, there seems a compelling reason to maintain them. There are also plenty of articles, like this one, available on the Internet providing suggestions on how to get the best out of using them. However, I would also like to highlight some traps that one may risk falling into when using these lists.
- Overreliance on To Do lists : Once you start using to do lists, you can end up feeling the need to put the smallest of tasks that you need to complete in this list. The problem with this approach is, after a period of time, you might start losing confidence in your own memory and feel that you absolutely need to enter the tasks in the list in order to be able to remember them
- Fiddling with the list too frequently : Another habit that some people develop is to be obsessed with their lists and reviewing it every hour and making unnecessary changes. This is quite obviously not useful since valuable time is wasted in updating the to do list instead of spending it on doing productive work. The ideal way to maintain the list up to date would be to review the list and update, if needed, in the morning – this would give you an idea of what all tasks you need to complete on that day – and reviewing and updating at the end of day – you can mark the completed tasks and add any new ones/change existing ones based on the day’s happenings
- Incomplete To Do lists : This is arguably much more damaging than being over reliant on the lists. If you are lazy in updating the list, you might miss adding some tasks to the list and since you have the false comfort that there is a To do list, you might not make an effort to remember those tasks. As a result, the task is lost and there is a high likelihood of you missing out on it.
In addition to talking about these pitfalls, I would also like to quote and recommend the strategy that I picked up from a lecture on Time Management by Randy Pausch. According to him, one should break up the To do list into a matrix as below
| Important – Due Soon (I) | Important – Not Due Soon (II) |
| Not Important – Due Soon (III) | Not Important – Not Due Soon (IV) |
* The numbers in the brackets indicate the order in which the quadrants must be visited to pick up new tasks
Essentially, there are 2 columns – tasks can be Due soon or Not due soon; and there are 2 rows – tasks which are Important or Not important. The mistake that most people make, according to Randy, is to take up Unimportant tasks just because they are due soon. The ideal thing to do is to take up and complete ALL Important tasks, ones which are Due soon first and then, the ones which are not due soon. Only if you have no pending important tasks should you take up Unimportant ones. The reasoning being that, when you are working on Important tasks which are not due soon, the Unimportant – Due soon ones can either be discarded (because they are not important) without any problems or they might become important in which case they will move to the first row and can be taken up next. I have been following it religiously ever since I saw his lecture and can vouch for its effectiveness. Hope you find it useful too.
If one manages to avoid falling into the traps I have mentioned above and maintain an accurate but practical to do list, it is bound to prove very useful in managing your time and work. So go ahead and give it a try, trust me, you will be glad you took the plunge.
