The Trouble With ToDo
It's frustrating watching someone prepare an elaborate to do list, isn't it? How much time is wasted by people who use their to do lists for procrastination? Worse still, what happens when you do a to do list and then get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it?
We are not very good at managing our time, because time is not really the same for us at any given moment. If you are having a good time, work or play time fizzes by like good champagne, and if you are bored, time drags like congealed sump oil.
The collision of this with a big list of things you should do is destined to bring you pain. So is there an alternative?
Well having studied the people who have the most urgent and important to do lists in the world, air traffic controllers, here are a few tips that might help;
- Realize that your day is finite and so only take on what you are pretty sure you can handle and not a lot more.
- Make space for emergencies and bump to do's to another day or put them in an extended holding pattern when emergencies come up.
- Hand off as much as you are comfortable with to other people and services as there are a wealth of people out there who can do what you need better faster and cheaper than you can.
- Focus on the the thing or person in front of you and not on the future or the past.
- Do not be worried about putting things off for good or till another day; as long as you are doing the things that are really important there is lots of stuff that really does not matter if you take a moment to really look.
Paper lists are not a good way to manage the stuff that you need to do as the time they take is too long and they are inflexible in emergencies. Air traffic controllers for many years have used little blocks called flight strips because they are tactile and easy to reorganize and difficult to loose track of.
Good to do applications are few and far between, and apart from our own iPad app, iNow, I recommend Toodledo and Ta-Da. But even a simple text editor is better than paper, because you can edit it on the fly.
Finally steer clear of any to do application that takes more than 15 minutes to learn!
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