Smarter To-Do Lists

This one is from the 43 Fold­ers web­site and is about mak­ing To Do Lists.

I’m sure many of us make To Do Lists in one form or another. And we prob­a­bly don’t think too much about it. But there is a really cool tech­nique of mak­ing to do lists and mak­ing sure that you get results because of it. These are some of main points of that arti­cle:

1) A to-do list is a list of tasks that can and should be done. What may sur­prise you is that many of the items on your to-do list may not belong there (or, con­versely, how many uncap­tured items do). The best and most use­ful to-dos share com­mon qualities:

* it’s a phys­i­cal action
* it can be accom­plished at a sit­ting
* it sup­ports valu­able progress toward a rec­og­nized goal
* it’s some­thing for which you are the most appro­pri­ate per­son for the job.

2) Break down items into NEXT ACTIONs. David Allen, the Get­ting Things Done guru, defines the NEXT ACTION as “the next phys­i­cal, vis­i­ble activ­ity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the cur­rent real­ity toward completion.”

A typ­i­cal to do list would prob­a­bly have this as an item: orga­nize for Tom’s big party. But that is such an enor­mous task and doesn’t really tell you what to do. So, in our exam­ple of begin­ning to orga­nize for Tom’s big party, we first want to learn when exactly he’ll be leav­ing town. But to obtain that infor­ma­tion, we’ll first need to call his house­mate, Sue, for details. But before we can call Sue, we’ll have to remem­ber where we jot­ted down her new work num­ber last week.

Sud­denly our focus has nar­rowed from the ginor­mous and ulti­mately un-doable “Plan Party” to the entirely man­age­able “Find Sue’s work num­ber.” While this is far from the only task we’ll have to com­plete for our party plan­ning, it’s clearly the next thing we’ll need to do before pro­ceed­ing. This is the bona fide “next action,” so it’s earned a place on our to-do list.

By always break­ing projects of any size into their true con­stituent next actions—and it’s def­i­nitely okay to have sev­eral at once per project—we’re mak­ing it fast and easy to always know what should be hap­pen­ing next.

3) Break the Big Nouns into lit­tle verbs. Instead of remind­ing your­self with the mys­te­ri­ous “Year-end report,” you’d more accu­rately first “Down­load Q3 spread­sheet from work server.” And, instead of “Get with Anil,” you’d prob­a­bly want to “Email Anil on Mon­day to sched­ule monthly disco funk party.”

Con­sider, for exam­ple, how an over­sized to-do like “Pre­pare the big pre­sen­ta­tion” might be improved upon by zero­ing in on the phys­i­cal­ity of a first step like “Draft four ideas for our presentation’s theme.”

So instead of a fuzzy giant activ­ity, what we’re doing is break­ing it down to do-able and better-defined chunks of activ­i­ties– tasks with clear edges; tasks that have a begin­ning and an end.

That’s all for now. I hope you had a great time read­ing this, and I hope you found this helpful.