Iuliia Bondar/Getty Images
Summary.
People love and rely on to-do lists for the many benefits they offer. They can help you clarify what needs to get done, prioritize your work, and manage your time. But there are many reasons they don’t always work.- First, they rely on guesstimates. Many of us tend to overload our to-do list because we are poor at estimating how much time a task will take to get done. Next, they offer too many choices. Research shows that our brains can only handle about seven choices before it gets overwhelmed. But odds are, your to-do list has more than seven tasks on it. Lastly, the biggest problems with to-do lists is that instead of making us feel organized and on top of things, they can lead to the opposite feeling: frustration and overwhelm.
- When you put something on a to-do list, you are both making a record of it and committing your future self to doing it. But most of us choose the path of least resistance. So we pick things that might seem the quickest and everything else just piles up. One way to deal with that is to rename your to-do list as a might-do list.
- Research shows that we intrinsically value activities we choose to do more than those we feel obligated to do. This is because having autonomy and control over our actions enhances motivation, while obligations and pressures reduce it. This simple act of renaming your to-do list as a might-do list shifts your mindset. It gives you permission to decide when and how you tackle those pesky routine tasks and chores.
For several years, I’ve kept two to-do lists for work (one just wasn’t enough). One list contains tasks that require deep, focused work and demand a decent chunk of time. The other list is for quick and easy tasks — things that don’t require much brainpower. But because I tend to avoid administrative work, this second list builds up fast (as does my guilt for not crossing things off it).