I’ve been using to-do lists for a long time and my app of choice at the moment is ✅ Todoist. One of the reasons I believe so much in to-do lists is because of the 🧠Extended Mind Hypothesis. Our tools can be considered part of our mind and can be used to offload some of the burden on our real brains.
Lately, I’ve felt that the usefulness went down though and I think it has a lot to do with to-do list hygiene.
The two main reasons for the drop in effectiveness are:
- Having items on a to-do list gives me the feeling that there’s always something I should be doing, negatively impacting my peace of mind.
- My to-do lists are cluttered with many things I probably won’t do.
Of course, number 2 contributes to the feeling of number 1.
The best item is no item
Managing a long list of to-do items takes effort. To avoid spending a lot of effort on this, ask yourself these two questions:
- When writing something down, is it important in the first place?
- When managing existing items, is it relevant still? Something can seem super important to remember in the moment, but after a while, you sometimes realise it’s not as important as it seemed in the moment and it’s okay to forget about it.
Nice-to-have vs Must-have
All to-do items fall into 2 different categories:
- Things you have to do
- Things you might want to do
I think differentiating between these two would be much more helpful because it removes the feeling of overwhelmedness.
Dates
I have many to-do items that have a date assigned to them, even though the date isn’t a strict deadline. It is very often used as a ‘from this day onwards this becomes relevant’, while in reality, I don’t want these items to show up on my to-do list at all.