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To do lists (1)

I have still never found a to-do list format and medium that works consistently for me. I’ve been a Filofax user, tried GTD, experimented with various flavours of Kanban and tried Asana and a few other apps, but nothing’s quite stuck.

I’m hoping to fix this in the coming weeks, so I’ve been thinking about what makes a good to do list.

Information it needs to be able to hold:

  • A set of priorities or major goals with provide an organising principle for the rest of the list – and a couple of categories to catch trivia and miscellanea.
  • The detail of a task – including a series of steps or substeps
  • A range of dates: due date, do date, date created
  • A priority system – perhaps in terms of importance, definitely in terms of time: today, this week, this month, later
  • A place for context-providing notes, link to googledocs etc

Other features. A to do list should:

  • Be accessible almost anywhere (on any device)
  • Be easy (and fast) to enter, modify and tick off tasks
  • Be easy to re-order tasks
  • Make completed tasks disappear somewhere else but not disappear
  • Have a kanban-like feature for tasks that are queued, started, being waited for (and in need of followup) and done.

Lastly and probably most importantly, it needs to be built into a practice – a disciplined practice – of prioritisation and review so that it gets regularly reviewed, acted on, and updated. Out of date to do lists are horrible. This is probably the hard part.

Good to-do list use looks something like:

  • The to do items and their prioritisation emerge from your strategy.
  • To do list referred to in the morning and priorities tweaked for the day ahead (5-10 minutes)
  • Important tasks given high priority – whatever happens they will be moved along. No excuses.
  • To-do list updated in response to the day (emails, calls, colleagues, etc)
  • But nothing that takes less than a couple of minutes to do gets onto the list – such tasks should be done immediately to reduce mental overhead and remove yourself as a bottleneck.
  • The list is pruned and re-tweaked at the end of the day, in preparation for the next one (5-10 minutes)

What am I missing? What works for you?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and recommended resources...

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