A simple, stress-free way to keep a to-do list

This post is meant for begin­ners in time management.

We’re used to think­ing that if you want to write your tasks down, it has to be in a diary: a list of tasks broken down by date, saying when each one needs doing.

What hap­pens in real­ity? We don’t manage to do most of the tasks by the set date, so we rewrite them onto other days, or come back to them later when we get around to it.

I think a diary like that only breeds stress and doesn’t help much with work. Its prob­lem is that it mixes two plan­ning tools: track­ing things tied firmly to a date or time, and keep­ing a gen­eral task list.

Here’s what I sug­gest to people just start­ing with time management:

  1. Keep things that must be done on a spe­cific date or at a spe­cific time in a sep­a­rate cal­en­dar. Unless you’re a teacher or a tutor, you actu­ally have few of these: birth­days and anniver­saries of all kinds, hol­i­days, trips, maybe quar­terly reports and meet­ings with friends planned in advance. Google Calendar serves me per­fectly for this. Though you can also use a paper diary or a reminder on your phone.
  2. Use a simple undated note­book (an exer­cise book will do) for the gen­eral task list.
  3. Don’t number your tasks: let the list run on continuously.
  4. Once again: drop the dates (every­thing tied to a date lives in the other list, remember?).
  5. Write every task down, one after another, with­out think­ing about how impor­tant it is and with­out set­ting priorities.
  6. Cross out the tasks you’ve done, and reg­u­larly review the ones you haven’t (tip: many “fall away” on their own after a while).

Once you get rid of dates, writ­ing tasks into the note­book gets easier: they won’t “stress you out” by having to be done when planned. If writ­ing them down is easier → you’re less likely to forget some­thing important. I wrote about the importance of writing down all your ideas long ago (and I’m not the only one).

None of these rec­om­men­da­tions are mine: they’re based on the advice of Mark Forster, set out in Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management and in his Autofocus system. But if you’re not ready to dig into those depths of time man­age­ment yet, just try the rec­om­men­da­tions above. They helped me a lot.