I confess: I am a list maker. I make lists from lists and reprioritize items as they change in urgency. And I am an old-school list maker, still using techniques honed from the likes of Stephen Covey, Hyrum Smith and even Dale Carnegie.
To-Do List Formula: A Stress-Free Guide to Creating To-Do Lists that Work!”
By Damon Zahariades
That’s why I was immediately drawn to Damon Zahariades’s “To-Do List Formula: A Stress-Free Guide to Creating To-Do Lists That Work!” So, first things first, I wrote the name and author on my list of books to read.
“The to-do list is one of the simplest task management systems in use today,” Zahariades writes. “Yet it continues to frustrate millions of people.”
That’s not your fault, even if you’ve had training in task-management systems, he says. But the results, often catastrophic, impact everyone’s performance in the workplace. And there are millions of people experiencing the same failed strategies.
What’s the importance of making lists? A solid to-do list should give you control over your day, the author says. It should also help you meet deadlines by singling out priorities. It will help make certain that you’re working on tasks at the right time. In doing this, it will enable you to avoid wasting time. Besides reducing stress, list making helps improve focus. Finally, list making will help eliminate frustration if you fall behind on projects by keeping you conscious of what you have accomplished.
Too many lists, Zahariades says, actually prevent you from getting things done. The author calls this “The Productivity Paradox.” Simply defined, we create to-do lists to help us be more productive, but use systems that sabotage our productivity.
Ideally, you should be able to cross off every item that appears on your to-do lists, according to Zahariades. He lists eight reasons why most people fail to do so:
• You misunderstand the goal of to-do lists. The real purpose is to organize your tasks and projects, highlighting what’s important.
• You neglect to assign deadlines. “A to-do list without deadlines is a wish list,” the author says. Deadlines prioritize tasks but also spur us to action.
• Your lists are too long. Such lists are distracting, by presenting too many options. Lists simply grow longer every day—a terrible approach to task management, the author concludes.
• Your lists have too much variability. Using your lists as a “brain dump,” your lists grow longer. That means you will start taking more time to get things done.
• You give yourself too many options. You wake up with a limited store of cognitive resources and use them quickly. You then fall into decision fatigue.
• You neglect to add context for each task. Most to-do lists lack context, making it difficult to know what needs attention. If your lists offer no context, they are ineffective.
• Your tasks are defined too broadly. Tasks need to be defined narrowly, including clear starting and ending points.
• Your tasks are not attached to specific goals. “Goals spur us to take action,” the author says. “We’re less inclined to procrastinate when we’re able to predict the positive result.”
To be successful, it’s critical that you attach a specific goal to each task itemized on your to-do list. You need to know the reason every item needs to be done, Zahariades says. Learning how to create and organize, as he suggests, reduces stress that impairs productivity.
Having argued his case for why we need to use lists, the author examines the most popular to-do lists. The first one, most people will admit to using at some time in their work and life, is the “massive, all-inclusive list.” Essentially it’s a brain dump. As you can imagine, this approach carries a long list of reasons why it doesn’t work. Among them, low priority tasks get too much attention.
A more successful technique might include the task-starting date/due date approach, which focuses on a master task list and daily task list, and uses a 3+2 strategy to select three big tasks and two small ones to be worked on that day.
The remainder of the book is an intensive on how to create the perfect to-do list. At this point, the reader should understand that the entire book seems a compilation of lists that are a tutorial on how to make lists. Taken together, these lists outline a system that will help you get your work done on time, and with less stress and frustration.