The Secret Ingredient to To-Do Lists is Priority

When I imagine a to-do list, what comes to mind is a list of everything I want to do. These to-do lists suck. Within a week or two, they become intimidatingly long and a chore to even look at. So, I stop looking at them. This is a real problem: my memory is not good enough to hold onto everything, which is why I started making lists in the first place. Instead of being long and demoralizing, I want my to-do lists to be motivating and help me focus on what’s important. 

The first thing I did to make my lists more motivating is split up the tasks into different categories. I have separate to-do lists for my writing practice, my volunteering with The Humane League, my day job, the improv class I’m helping a friend with, and everything I need to do to keep my life running (taxes, doctor’s appointments, budget balancing, etc.) (1). By dividing to-do lists by categories, there’s a clear connection between motivation and task. 

Within categories, I usually have specific goals, i.e. concrete, beneficial outcomes (if you’ve never looked at SMART goals, I highly recommend it as a way for thinking about goals). For example, my writing goal looks like publishing an essay every week. Once I have a concrete goal, I can work backwards to figure out what tasks are needed. To write an essay, I need to pick a topic, make sure there’s enough to say, do a draft, get it reviewed, and make edits. 

Within a single to-do list, I prioritize the tasks on the list (I also prioritize at the level of categories, but that is a separate conversation). A prioritized list means I am always working on the most important task within a category and reduces the amount of time I spend deciding what to do. 

Translating an unprioritized to-do list to a prioritized one involves a series of comparisons: I start by taking the top two items of my unprioritized to-do list and deciding which is more important (I find it much easier to compare two items than ten). Then, I’ll take the next item from the unprioritized list and walk down the prioritized list to see where it fits in (Is it more important than most first task? How about the second? Third?). The process then repeats for each of the remaining items in my unprioritized to-do list, until all of them are inserted into the prioritized to-do list (2). Usually, I don’t have to do all the comparisons explicitly and can eyeball where in the ranking a task should go.

To decide which of two tasks is more important, I look at the consequences of not doing each task and consider which are worse.  A comparison straight from one of my to-do lists is “making 2020 donations” vs. “setting up my yearly physical” I prioritized making a donation because the end of the year is coming up and delaying my donation will mess up my taxes for the coming year, while delaying a routine physical for another week or two will probably have no consequences. 

Having to-do lists arranged by categories also helps with the prioritization: categories and goals provide a way of judging progress, and the task that makes the most progress gets the highest priority. With my writing goal to publish an article every week, on the night before I publish, I’d better work on polishing an old essay rather than starting something new. 

My last important tool is to routinely create new to-do lists. To-do lists, like baked goods, quickly go stale: when the version of me who wrote the list is out of sync with the version who is supposed to do the tasks, I have little motivation to follow through. I always have more information on what is most important to my goals than the original author of the to-do list. Even if I decide what’s on the old list is still relevant, the active affirmation maintains a sense of agency. 

I am still working on what the practice of routinely creating new to-do lists looks like. I’m planning on trying out a daily to-do list pieced together from my long term goals, my project lists, and leftovers from the previous day’s to-do list. I’m looking forward to finding a practice that keeps my daily actions aligned with my long term goals and what is most important to me. 

Thanks to Early Readers: Erin Rosenfeld, Bryce Woodworth

Essay Inspired by Long Lists Don’t Get Things Done in “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

1. Housekeeping, aka  “bureaucratic things I need to do to keep my life running,” which included such thrilling tasks as taxes, cleaning, doctor and dentist appointments, and monthly budgeting.
2. Self-care, aka “things that make me a generally happy and functioning human being,” mostly consisting of exercise, time to cook, and time for relaxation and socializing
3. Passion projects, aka “work that feeds my soul,” consisting of writing, volunteering, and learning new skills