I remember 20, or even 25 years ago, my old boss telling me not to score out the items on my handwritten to-do list, but to make them into a kind of snake to the right-hand side of the list with circles intersecting, something that was positive and not destructive because scoring out was a destructive act.
What a load of unadulterated s**te. The problem with to-do lists is nothing to do with the to-do list, absolutely nothing to do with the format of the to-do list. It could be on paper, it could be on the most exquisite and well-developed software system in the world, which looks entirely beautiful and is intuitive with backend AI to sort for you.
It doesn't matter.
The problem with to-do lists is that you always write a list longer than you can do in the time that you've given yourself.
This is perhaps not true for a very few people who are enormously disciplined, but for the rest of us, it's absolutely clear that all we do is write to-do lists that we cannot complete.
What we then do is find new ways to write to-do lists. So, we start perhaps on a piece of A4 paper because it's neat and tidy, and then we transfer it to something on our phone, perhaps Apple Notes, and then we get more sophisticated and we use something like Basecamp or Asana or whatever software it is you're using. The paid app that promises to organise your life and make it better. The AI Bolt-on, which manages to do it all for you and to anticipate what's on the list before you even start.
But none of this is a time machine, and none of this will mean that you can get more work done in the space you have available than you did yesterday. And all of this means that all that happens is your to-do list becomes an anxiety list.
The alternative approach, the one that's championed by Oliver Burkeman, is to consider your to do list like a wine cellar, a place where you put things and come back to them when you feel like it, when you want to sample it or even like a river flowing past you, where you're able to pick out pieces and leave the rest of it going.
You will never get to the end of your list. Whether it's an email list, a WhatsApp list, or a to-do list. The ability of the technology to fire more things at you than you can handle is absolutely understood. The understanding that you won't finish means you can be less tied to your to-do list and more tired of just getting going and living list.
Blog Post Number - 4349