The List Is LifeFinding a new way to manage my day.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 7:11 AM ET
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StumbleUponSome people carry uplifting phrases with them for inspiration. "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away." I used to carry around the opposite kind of reminder: a list of short sentences that instantly depressed me. My to-do list.
Since childhood I carried the burden. My mother or some well-meaning teacher once told me to write a list of the things you need to do, and when you do one, cross it off! That was fine when the items included "color within the lines" and "play catch." Marking down tasks was gratifying at first. To have begun is to be half done! But as I grew, the list did, too. And it became a monument to the things I hadn't done.
To fix my problem, I tried to fix the list. I'd write in different colors to prioritize until I could only keep track of all my pens by wearing a bandoleer. I crossed out completed items twice instead of once, as if I couldn't complete a task because of flawed demarcation between finished and unfinished. I've written lists in different places—calendars, special notebooks, and the palm of my hand. I've sent myself e-mail reminders until I considered putting myself in my spam blocker. None of it helped get the undone things done any faster.
By now some of you are nodding or shaking your heads. You've either had the same experience or know how to get out of it. I want to hear your ideas and solutions. Send your thoughts, best iPhone applications, or whatever you use to help keep track of things or pictures of your to-do list to us at . I'll write another story collecting your best tips and share them to create a more organized world.
Back to the story of how I tried to fix my to-do list. To rescue myself from the slavery of the awful to-do list, I turned to David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, and Merlin Mann, the author of 43folders.com (among other things). If what you're about to read makes sense, read these two next. It's the only way to really understand. If I don't make any sense, then read these two—they explain it better and more entertainingly.
The first thing I did was blow up my to-do list. It had at least two flaws: It sat in just one place, and each item was unwieldy—a cluster of actions rather than bite-size ones. An example: Digging through the boxes in my garage, cursing the disorganization, I came across an old planner from 1995. "Clean garage," it said on June 6. That was from an entirely different house. I've moved, and the to-do lists have moved with me. The old garage never got cleaned (until we moved), and the new one isn't clean, either. This can get existential. I'm going to have items on my to-do list that will never get done in my entire existence.
The first trick is to turn the big project into little action items. This is one of the key theories behind Getting Things Done. "You need to break down each noun into tiny little transitive verbs," says Mann. So now the list reads: Call carpet recycler to dispose of carpet, buy container for baseball cards, and buy hooks to hang tools. I no longer stand at the door of the garage wondering where to begin.
The clustered item is a silent killer. It not only makes cleaning the garage harder because you don't know where to start. It keeps you from writing things down on your list at all. I want to rock climb. But if I'm thinking in clusters, it just all seems too daunting.
The other thing that kept me from crossing off items is that I had only one list for all sorts of different tasks. So, for example, I'd write "go rock climbing" right after "call Robert Gibbs to schedule daylong interview with President Obama." Depending on my mood, one of those two things would feel out of place. I'd probably call Gibbs and forget about the rock climbing. I'd do this another thousand times until I rewrote the list and rock climbing wasn't on it.
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I use a similar strategy I developed to help me cope with my writing and research responsibilities. Tasks are divided and conquered, with prioritizing on the way.
It also helps to clear out clutter in your life. We often have tons of worthless little things we do, TV shows we follow, habits of listening to NPR while eating breakfast or driving to work, scripts we go over in the shower. If you can cut out a few of those, have a little more time for quiet, it helps you be calm enough to do the things you need to do, to have a peaceful moment when you can exercise the creative and organizational faculties needed to break down big tasks into sub-tasks and then to plan the order in which to take them on.
So maybe ditch Farmville or even Facebook. Or drop the All Things Considered. Or don't listen to a podcast while driving home. Try it for a week.
-- Cracker
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If I want to accomplish a lot in a very short time, I treat it as a project and put the tasks in Microsoft Project with the tasks prioritized according to their importance. I even developed a project plan for meeting beautiful women when I was a young man. Boy was that painful but it worked.
When I was a student, I would have every moment of my day scheduled from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. The problem is not making the list but doing the list. If you have scheduled events like interviewing the president for the whole day, well they take care of themselves but spending time cleaning the garage or learning French; that's a different matter. Making the list is easy; doing the list is hard.
With project management, you can adjust for your failures by simply shifting the dates otherwise you have a tendency, after numerous failures to just throw the list away.
-- mlang46
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