Using lists effectively is the secret to success. Important thoughts occur to us spontaneously throughout the day—things to do, to follow up on, to buy, to talk with someone about. If you don’t capture them immediately, they’ll be gone. Keep your lists in one place and keep that one place with you all the time so you can enter things you want to do before you forget them. Don’t let yourself develop the habit of jotting things down on multiple pads of paper. I’ve seen too many people frustrated by notepads all over their office, each one with the top half-dozen sheets of paper covered with lists of various sorts. The result is they don’t know where to look next. What has already been done and what has been overlooked are lost in the visual clutter of half-completed, partially crossed-off lists.
You may decide to separate your list into tasks of different categories, but at least if everything is in one place you’ll know exactly where to look when you are at the store, on your way to a meeting, ready to return phone calls, or when you find yourself with a few extra moments to get something done. To make things easy, that one place with all your lists should be in your planner/calendar! That way, you can quickly transfer a task from one of your lists right into your calendar if you see you have an open slot in your schedule.
While I’m in favor of lists in general, I do make a distinction between “someday” lists that capture every task, hope, dream, and intention that ever crossed your mind and real “right now” to-do lists—tasks you actually schedule into your planner to do on a specific day. Everyone has lists filled with things that will probably never get done—they’re either not essential, or require some resource that isn’t available, or the time isn’t right, or for some other reason. Some items on your “someday” list may eventually become “right now” items for a real to-do list, but continually reviewing lengthy lists and feeling inadequate because you can’t fit everything into your current schedule is self-defeating.
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