Do you really need a to-do list?
In the age of personal optimization, when books like The 4-Hour Workweek peddle the idea that you could be superhumanly productive if you just had the right tools, the question is almost blasphemous. Of course you need a to-do list. How else are you supposed to know what to work on during that 15-minute gap between practicing your TED talk and going to your CrossFit class?
I’m being sarcastic, of course, but the idea that every busy person should have a to-do list is so baked into our culture that the first Palm Pilot back in 1997 had a button just for that. The fetish lives on in today’s smartphone app stores, where there are literally thousands of list-making and to-do apps to choose from.
Some of these apps are quite nifty, and lists do have a place in our lives. There’s even a book called The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, which argues that doctors can save lives by adhering to checklists when they see patients. In case you haven’t found a to-do app you like, I’ve listed a few of the best options below. But what I’d really like to do in my first Voice of Xperience column is take a look at the fundamental reasons people use to-do lists. I want to sort the good reasons from the bad, and ask whether there might ultimately be better ways to think about managing our workload and our commitments.
| The List List: Recommended To-Do List Apps for your Smartphone | |
| Any.do | www.any.do |
| Astrid | www.astrid.com |
| Apple Reminders | www.apple.com/osx/apps/#reminders |
| Clear | www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/ |
| Fetchnotes | www.fetchnotes.com |
| Good To-Do | goodtodo.com/ |
| Remember The Milk | www.rememberthemilk.com/ |
| Taskforce | www.taskforceapp.com/ |
| Todoist | todoist.com/ |
| Wunderlist 2 | www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist |
Thoreau once said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” My own attitude boils down to this: beware of all enterprises that require a to-do list. And when you do engage in a project so complex that you have to start a list, don’t let the list itself consume you.
Let’s talk first about the kind of stuff people put on to-do lists. It’s never the actions that would really make a difference in your life—things like “Change careers,” “Finally learn Italian,” “Do something nice for my significant other,” or “Plan for retirement.” Rather, it’s the little stuff you feel like you have to do to meet your day-to-day obligations to your employer or your family. Things like “File expense report,” “Finish PowerPoint deck for Tuesday’s meeting,” and “Buy milk.”
The traditional argument for maintaining a to-do list is that if you don’t get such items out of your head and write them down, you’ll suffer the constant mental stress of trying to remember them. (Psychologists have a name for that: the Zeigarnik effect, the nagging feeling that you’ve left a task incomplete.) You won’t have a “mind like water,” to quote one of productivity guru David Allen’s favorite phrases, and you won’t be ready to focus your full attention on each task.
That’s true, as far as it goes. Unless you have a photographic memory, which nobody really does, you aren’t going to be able to keep your whole grocery list in your head. So by all means, write stuff down. Just be aware that if you only put quotidian tasks on your list, and you spend all your time executing those tasks, you’ll never get anything important done.
Here’s where the to-do list debate smashes into that other “productivity” tool that rules so much of our lives: e-mail. Every time-management system ever invented comes with its own set of dictates about dealing with your e-mail. But almost all of them start with having a separate to-do list—or as many as 43 of them, in the case of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (one for every day of the coming month and every month of the year).
In GTD, emptying your inbox goes like this: Delete the unimportant e-mails. Archive the ones with information you might need later. Act on the requests that can be executed in two minutes or less, then delete those messages too. Translate everything else into an item on a to-do list.
I follow this procedure myself, but I am none too happy about it. Yes, I get a little spurt of dopamine for every e-mail I delete, and a big one when I reach inbox zero. But what have I really accomplished in the end? Nothing, except
