Having recently attended JP Morgan’s awesome talk on fearlessness and how to live outside of your comfort zone, one the most interesting things was the concept that in procrastination hides fear. As an extension of that I discovered that I procrastinate about writing to-do lists and completing the items on it (if writing a new blog post wasn’t on my to-do list, I could even argue that writing this very post was a way of avoiding my to-do list ).

So this post is a short piece summarising some of my research into how to write a good to-do list that you can manage and complete.

Some of the bullet point items that help make a good to-do list:

Keep a single list

It seems like a stupid thing to say, however I have a whiteboard in my office that I write my to-dos on, but I can’t take it with me, so I also have a to-do list in my iPhone. I used to have a little notebook that I carried around as well, so I have to be extremely careful to ensure that the I match up my whiteboard and iPhone task lists. Ideally I want to be able to just use my iPhone task list or find a decent iPhone app, but there’s something I really like about writing a to-do list big on a whiteboard.

Why not find yourself a tool (either electronic or other) that you can keep one single list up-to-date and with you at all time so that you can add to it whenever and wherever you are. If you’re into mind maps, checkout this mind map on www.mindmeister.com which has a good list of online task management tools as well as online collaboration tools.

Categorise your tasks

This is one of those areas where people traditionally keep different lists based on different task categories or projects. I for example had a “music to listen to” list where I jotted down new artists and tracks as I heard them as a remind to find the on Spotify or Last.fm at a later point. Ideally, these type lists should all be on your one to-do list and its where technology and a decent task management tool can help because you can shrink the full list of tasks to only show certain categories or only certain projects so that the whole list seems manageable.

Plan ahead, schedule and prioritise

Always schedule your to-dos (see below). Set a time and date and a duration. This way you know when and how long each item will take. Also, by scheduling, you will get in the habit of checking that your scheduled to-do is not accidentally (or on purpose) scheduled to conflict with a pre-existing appointment.

Some of the advice I read about to-do lists talked about prioritising your tasks and it is a good point, however if you’re scheduling your tasks, then you are already prioritising aren’t you? Of course you may choose not to schedule every task, so perhaps prioritising those that are not timed is a happy medium.

Be factual

Only add those items you know will be coming up.

Adding imaginary or just-in-case items is you adding fears onto your list which will inevitably make your to-do list scarier and therefore less likely to be looked at, so why waste your time and effort creating a to-do if you’re not going to complete it?

Write in pencil

If you’re keeping a manual list, write it in pencil. That way you can re-order and edit your list without making it all ugly with loads of crossing outs and words straying onto other lines fouling up the layout of the list. If you’re list is ugly, you’re less likely to want to look at it.

Review

Put time aside (is that a task by any chance?) to review your to-do list and look at the items that you’ve completed and those that you’ve not. Ask yourself what it is that keeps preventing you from completing those tasks that habitually get postponed again and again and again.

There are two reasons that you might be postponing these items:

• You have an underlying fear of doing the task.
• The task listed contains several sub tasks and seems to big or difficult to complete now.

These are easily dealt with:

• Schedule yourself a dedicated time to complete scary tasks. Steel yourself and visualise yourself successfully completing each one before doing it.
• Turn the larger or difficult seeming tasks into projects each with their own sub-tasks. Now you can approach each sub-task as you would any other each one taking you a step closer to completing the overall project.

I hope you find some of the above useful and interesting and the writing of this has solidified several ideas and tasks in my mind as well, so I’m off to update my to-do list