Decent Little To-do List

Decent Little To-do List

A convenient tree-style to-do list. Fully customizable fonts, colors, and categories. Easy and convenient to use. Minimizes to a tray icon, and pops up with a shortcut key. The tree has any number of sub levels. 9 customizable color-coded categories. Import, export, print, and copy to plain text. Save and load color schemes and settings. This version is the first release on CNET Download.com.

How effective is your to-do list? Does it help you plan your day? Does it nudge you to prioritize the right tasks? Or is it a never-ending list of things you feel guilty for not having done yet and now you’re not going to do any of them? A good to-do list should serve you. You should not be at its mercy.

The best to-do lists set you off in the right direction each day and help you focus on the tasks that are most important. With the right strategies, a to-do list can help you achieve larger goals, too. Here’s what you need to know to make your to-do list work for you.

Notice how I said “notebook?” While there are many benefits to putting your to-do list into an app (and I’ll list them in a moment), there is nothing wrong with paper! If paper works for you, great. Likewise, a simple spreadsheet or word processing document is fine, too. Use the tool that’s right for you.

Digital to-do lists have several advantages over paper, however, and it’s good to at least know what they are, even if you end up using paper. Some advantages are:

• They’re easy to edit, which means you can update information quickly,
• They have built-in reminders,
• It’s very hard to lose them because the list itself is usually saved in the cloud,
• You can sort your tasks by priority, due date, or alphabetically, and
• You can assign tasks to other people and get notified when they complete them.If you are in the market for a to-do list app, which one is best? Having tested dozens of them, I tend to recommend Todoist, Asana, and Things more often than others. But there are many other options. OmniFocus is good for people who add a lot of detail to their tasks. Trello speaks to visually driven people. Microsoft To Do works well with Office and Windows 10. Google Tasks is great for its Google Workspace integration. Habitica might draw your attention if you like gamification. And so onYou shouldn’t have just one to-do list. You should have a few lists that cover the major categories of your life, such as Work Tasks, Personal To-Dos, and Household Chores. Having more than one list helps you focus. When you’re at work, you don’t want to be distracted by your personal list. When you’re at home, you don’t want to be burdened thinking about your work responsibilities.

   

   

  Don’t hold back. Make lists for everything you think of! The useful ones will stick around. You can scrap any that end up not being useful to you.

  Some other ideas are:

  • Shopping,
  • Someday (where you write down unimportant tasks that you might do someday),
  • Weekend (for anything you want to do on the weekend but don’t want to be distracted by during the week), and
  • Chores for Kids.

  Remember, you can add new lists or rename them at any time.

  If your to-do app has a keyboard shortcut for adding a new task, learn it. If your app has a mobile phone shortcut, set it up.

  For those using paper, keep a bit of scrap paper near you while you work to jot down distracting thoughts quickly and then copy them into your official to-do lists when it’s convenient.When a new task pops into your head, write it down as quickly as possible. Adding tasks when you think of them prevents you from dwelling on them. Once it’s written down, you don’t need to remember it anymore, so you can purge the thought from your brain.When a new task pops into your head, write it down as quickly as possible. Adding tasks when you think of them prevents you from dwelling on them. Once it’s written down, you don’t need to remember it anymore, so you can purge the thought from your brain.

  Oh, man. It’s happened again. Your pal Britney is on your IG stream showing off everything from her yoga skills to her cute kid to her amazing professional success.

  And you’re trawling the internet for your third consecutive hour, desperately seeking evidence of the butthole edit of “Cats.”

  Between housework, work-work, working out, and making friendships work, achieving goals, meeting expectations, and making deadlines always seem like more work than the work itself.

  Creating an efficient to-do list is an amazing first step. You’re finally sitting in front of the Hallowed Checklist of Fate. And if you’re not yet, add making a to-do list to your to-do list.

  We’ll show you how to turn that list into a productivity horcrux that helps you keep up with Britney, the All-Achieving Fictional Yoga Mom. These 15 tips will help you organize your life into a manageable list and crush it.

  Then obliterate it.A well-crafted to-do list acts as a guiding light for your day. It helps you overcome feelings of being overwhelmed, and reduces anxiety around whether you’re being productive throughout the day. Before I dive in to explain how I craft my to-do list each day, I’d like to point out that to-do lists come in all shapes and sizes—it’s all about what works for you as an individual. This method is what works for me personally; it’s up to you to decide what to implement into your own planning system. I encourage you to try these techniques, but if you find that only some apply to your life, then by all means take what works for you and leave the rest.

  Not everyone runs on lists. However, if you’re struggling to make sense of your goals, a list could save you time, energy, and the need to come up with excuses for when the thing that needs to happen, well, doesn’t.

  (If you have a word with Oskar Schindler, he’ll tell you that lists can also save lives.)

  List-making is pretty personal. Some people border on obsessive about them. Organizing the bathroom can turn into a session of ticking off 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, rather than a freestyle shift-around between number 2s.

  Others prefer less to-doing and fro-ing. They’d rather wing it, writing important telephone numbers on the backs of their hands or sticking Post-its to their leg, “Memento”-style.

  However, even the most basic outline of the things you need to do can help you crush your goals and foes. Largely, your goals.

  For one thing, the act of writing out a list forces us to set concrete goals (To-do: “Take out the trash.”). This can be way more effective than thinking about vague objectives (To-don’t: Get cleaner).

  Plus, making a written list can help us remember important information (meaning that trash won’t sit in the kitchen for weeks, or that if it does, you won’t forget to charge it rent).Burack OR, et al. (1996). The effects of list-making on recall in young and elderly adults. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8673643

  The problem is this: Not all lists are created equal.

  Even those of us who have bumper stickers that read: “People who make to-do lists tick every box” might not know how to make a successful one. (That’s a terrible bumper sticker, BTW. If it’s real, and you actually have it, add “abandon your vehicle by the side of the road and set it aflame” to the very top of your to-do list.)

  Luckily we’re here to help, with a step-by-step guide to creating — and completing — an awesome list of stuff to get done.

  Once I tackled a task, I would put an “X” through the bullet and make a little note (in parenthesis) to remind myself when I accomplished it, or where the results can be found. I use the notebook threading technique described by Kim at Tiny Ray of Sunshine.

  Every time I thought of something that needed to be done, it got added to this master list. When I sat down in the evening to craft my to-do list for the next day, I referenced my brain dump to see what had become a time-sensitive task.

  I would also pull tasks from this list if I had a particularly light load the next day and had time to tackle non-pressing items—ones that would be nice to get done and out of the way.

  Once I have carefully crafted my to-do list for the following day, I look it over and decide which tasks will be my “top three” for the day. Some experts call this a HIT (that’s high-impact tasks) list.

  To determine my top three tasks for the day, I ask myself the following questions:

  • What task(s) will have the most impact on my day?
  • What task(s) needs to get done today?
  • If I get nothing else done today, what task(s) will make me feel the most accomplished?

  Once I’ve figured out which tasks are the most important, I number them 1, 2, and 3. It’s important to note that I do not necessarily tackle them in that order. I may start with number three because it’s quick and easy. This gets the momentum going in my day and energizes me to tackle the bigger/longer tasks on my list.

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