Many of us have a ToDo-list somewhere. And the damned thing keeps growing. At some point, reorganizing the list became easier than actually doing anything on it.
Adding things is easy. Learn Italian. Read that book. Fix the website. Exercise more. Visit Mongolia. Finally deal with whatever is living in that drawer in the kitchen. The trouble starts when the list stops being helpful and begins quietly judging you.
ToDo-lists aren’t inherently evil. They’re just lists. The problem is that ambition is cheap while time remains stubbornly finite. You get the same number of hours every day, regardless of how impressive your productivity system looks.
A full calendar works the same way. Once it’s full, adding another activity doesn’t magically create more time. It simply means everything gets squeezed a little harder until even lunch starts looking like an administrative inconvenience. So how do you manage a ToDo-list without eventually wanting to set fire to it?
- Select
Write things down. Getting them out of your head is useful. But don’t confuse recording an idea with making a commitment. You simply don’t have time to do everything you might conceivably want to do. Neither does anyone, except perhaps people who write books about productivity and apparently have seventeen assistants. Choose what deserves to survive.
- Combine
Look for things that can be done together. The key word is batching. If several tasks require the same place, tools or state of mind, batch them. One trip, several errands. One phone call, several questions. One afternoon of tedious administration instead of allowing it to contaminate an entire week. Efficiency isn’t necessarily about moving faster. Sometimes it’s simply about avoiding doing the same stupid thing twice.
- Eliminate
If something takes only a few minutes, do it now. Done.
More importantly, look for things that shouldn’t be done at all. Lists accumulate archaeological layers of former enthusiasm: projects you no longer care about, books you no longer want to read, clever ideas that seemed considerably cleverer at two in the morning.Delete them. No ceremony. No guilt. No small Viking funeral.
- Structure
There are endless ways to organize this stuff. Yellow Post-it notes. Notebooks. Spreadsheets. Elaborate task-management systems with tags, priorities, deadlines, categories, subcategories and enough metadata to manage the invasion of Normandy. None of them is universally correct. The best system is the one you actually use without spending more time maintaining the system than doing the work. Try different approaches. Keep what works. Throw away the rest.
- Validate
This is probably the most important part. Look at each item and ask: Does this really need to be done? Will it matter in five years? Will it matter next month? What actually happens if you delete it? Sometimes removing one mediocre obligation gives you enough time and attention to do something important properly.
And here’s the beautiful part: a deleted task is no longer on the list. Technically, that’s progress.
For a deeper dive into the strange human obsession with organizing everything we haven’t done yet, David Allen’s Getting Things Done contains plenty of useful advice. It can occasionally feel like productivity has been promoted from useful habit to minor religion, but as always with these kinds of books, cherry-pick the ideas that work for you.
Richard Koch’s The 80-20 principle is also worth reading. The basic idea is the Pareto principle: a surprisingly large share of results often comes from a relatively small share of causes. Find the useful 20 percent. Be suspicious of the other 80.
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
— Bruce Lee
And if you’re constantly overwhelmed by everything you don’t have time to do, perhaps the problem isn’t that you have too little time. Perhaps you simply have too ambitious a list. You can almost always choose to do fewer things. Getting more hours in the day remains, irritatingly, unavailable.
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