How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
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How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
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Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#2 > To-do lists get a lot of flack,
> but the simple act of planning
> has some psychological and
> productivity benefits all
> by itself.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#3I am waiting for God to send a white person. The white person will see God talking and announce it to the World. Just be patient.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#4> To-do lists get a lot of flack, > but the simple act of planning > has some psychological and > productivity benefits all > by itself. My problem is that TODO lists are not necessarily a solid basis for planning. Specifically, they are often only good for easy plans.
If I don't write tasks in a TODO list I get anxious I'll forget about it forever. Even if I don't plan on doing a task anytime soon I like to jot it down so I have the freedom to forget about it.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#5Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook.
The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly.
For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc.
But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages per quarter that I fill with "quarterly goals". I try to keep the list under 20-30 items and keep them high-level. Every week, I look at the same two pages and make sure that I am making progress toward them. If not, I go back to my daily notes and see if I worked on the right stuff the previous week. This is a variation on the idea that I stole from Aaron Levie [2].
For me, the tactile/tangible nature of paper note-taking, as well as its flexibility in formatting, has been incredibly useful.
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-b...
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#6> To-do lists get a lot of flack, > but the simple act of planning > has some psychological and > productivity benefits all > by itself. My problem is that TODO lists are not necessarily a solid basis for planning. Specifically, they are often only good for easy plans.
1) Get nuclear fusion working.
2) Make 'Project Orion' style spacecraft a reality.
Nah, see. They solve all the problems!
To do lists don't solve all the problems, but they might be a step in the right direction.
Similarly, entering the issues into JIRA might not fix them, but it makes getting the issues fixed more likely.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#7When I was in my 20s I could hold my daily ToDo lists entirely in my memory. This was useful for tracking coding features and bugs. Somewhat older now, I do this with a legal pad.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#8My paper to-do list is only immediate things (e.g. pick up 'script, dog to vet). Everything else is on the calendar (with reminders) and gets moved to the list when it's time.
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#9I've found out recently that rather than being something you make or plan, TODO list is the end result of doing something else. Specifically, it's the result of taking notes about your life and your works, TODO list is just what left after you filter out all the actionable items.
For example, when I'm doing development work, I'm trying to keep a journal of what I'm doing, why I'm doing something, which step of the task I'm on, what the boss wanted to get done. With those info, when I get back to work tomorrow, it's simple to get back the "TODO item" in the task.
The difference being that a list of TODO things on its own is pretty hard to follow through and act: it's missing context (or the action is too vague), we tend to have certain routine anyway and an ordered list of everything isn't helpful since there is a limited number of tasks we can do at a certain context. There are some productivity that tries to fix the missing context problem by assigning context with a task, but they just amplify another issue when making todo list: it's not that simple to write an actionable item. At least 90% of the time I've tried, my item always ends up being broken down to several more items when I started working on them, or I'm missing the mark on planning the item. And they're always because I'm not in the mindset of a task when I'm making its TODO items -- I plan things at the start or end of week/ day, rather than when I'm actually doing the task.
I think TODO list is just a special kind of notes, and I think a lot of people would benefit from taking more notes about their lives, both for the past (journal) and future (planning). Although "past" and "future" is a bit of an unnecessary distinction here.
Don't make to-do list, just take more notes, write things down. You will notice all the bullet point in the article would apply if you change "writing to-do lists" into "taking notes".
Just a tangent, but that's also why I think org-mode is the only note-taking/to-do app that did it right: TODO item is both part of the normal notes, and well supported with multitude of features around it (all the agenda functionalities).
Re: How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
#10My paper to-do list is only immediate things (e.g. pick up 'script, dog to vet). Everything else is on the calendar (with reminders) and gets moved to the list when it's time.
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