Business Insight Zone

Want advice on whittling down your To-Do list? Oh, I’m full of that kind of advice:

• Toss something off the list.
• Change verb tenses to promote action.
• Banish multitasking.
• Parse ruthlessly.
• Make a STOP-doing list.
• . . . and so on.

Heck, I even wrote a little poem about to-do’s.

But while all of this advice aims to help you and me both get more to-do’s done, it’s possible that none of it goes far enough — at least if it doesn’t help us to change habits of inattention, overburden, multitasking, or mindless repetition. Hey, we’re human — our brains are wired to follow habits. No need to cry about it . . . but no need to remain a slave to old patterns, either.

The Prescription

This is the medicine I’m taking.

1. Pull all your to-do’s into one place. (If this means you have to have to fill 20 pages of a word-processing document, so be it.)
2. At the top of the list write “Maybe Do” in place of “To Do.”
3. Find a pad of paper, a blank table in a quiet room, and an undisturbed hour. (This may be the hardest step. But persevere.)
4. Read through the “Maybe Do” list without writing anything down. Just read through the whole thing, line by line, to remind yourself what’s on it.
5. On your blank pad of paper, make a heading: “To REALLY Do.”
6. Under that heading, write down the half-dozen things from the “Maybe Do” list that genuinely must happen — so you can keep your job, so you can be a good parent, so you can become world-famous, so your company can stop gushing red ink, or whatever is most important to you.
7. Seriously, limit it to half a dozen, at the outside. Go back and mark out items you wrote down on the “To REALLY Do” list until there are only six.
8. Do those things.
9. Repeat steps 4 – 8 ad infinitum.

What do you think? Try it and tell me if it works for you.

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Construction photo by hansntareen, used under a Creative Commons license.