Why Ditching Your To-Do List Will Increase Your Productivity

Don’t Work From Your To-do List

Before we begin, let me explain. I am not against a list, in fact I love a list, I am the list queen. I am an avid fan of checklists too and thoroughly enjoyed reading Atul Gawande’s ground breaking book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. However, I don’t make the error of working from to-do lists.

There are six fundamental problems with to-do lists that make them ineffective.

1. Procrastinating on the important tasks

A to-do list is just an excuse to procrastinate. How often do you scan your list just so that you can pick off the ones you can finish in two minutes? Or you go for the easiest items first (but these are not usually the ones that are the most important). When your to-do list contains some tasks that are three minutes long and some that will take 60 minutes, you will focus on the shorter / easier ones to enjoy the satisfaction, that feeling that comes from crossing an item off your list.

2. Lack of information

To-do lists do not provide sufficient information about tasks to enable you to determine what you should prioritise and work on first. After all, all tasks look the same on paper. The list does not tell you how long each task will take, when can you do it and how important it is. It also does not answer the important questions such as how much time do you need and when are you available to do it.

3. We overload our lists

In research published in the book, The Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List by Bailey Adams, Adams reports that 41% of all the items on a person’s to-do list are never completed. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and journalist John Tierney, authors of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, report in their book that one person typically has at least 150 different tasks on their to-do list, and that an executive’s to-do list for a single Monday could take more than a week to finish.

4. To-do lists can cause anxiety

Those nagging (and often distracting) thoughts about uncompleted tasks and unmet goals hanging around in your mind are known as the Zeiganik effect. Worrying about how long our to-do list is and realising how little time we have causes a persistent worry in our head that distracts us from tackling the very tasks that we are worrying about. In their study, Conflict among personal strivings, Psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King discovered that the anxiety that results from having too many conflicting goals causes our productivity as well as our physical and mental health to suffer.

5. Long-term projects suffer

To-do lists often have a negative impact on long-term goals. How many items on your to-do list are linked to your actual long-term big vision goals? It is likely that your to-do list focuses on the short term and not the more serious projects that require significant time and planning! As Jamie Novak, author of Keep This Toss That: Unclutter Your Life to Save Time, Money, Space, and Sanity explains in her book, long-term projects usually end up on the bottom of the list, as we put things off in favour of the easier, quicker tasks (remember my point number 0ne!)until the deadline gets so close they become last-minute emergencies.

6. Unnecessary items

I have always believed that if you can accomplish the task in a couple of minutes now, then just do it, don’t write it down. This is what I call the “two minute rule”. How much time is wasted writing a task down on a to-do list when it would be quicker and more efficient just to get on and do it! As Bailey Adams writes in his book, The Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List, 10% of items on a person’s to-do list are completed within a minute.