Boost Your Productivity with the Humble To-Do List
Productivity is a topic that often leaves people feeling uneasy. From a philosophical standpoint, the concept itself is a nightmare. In American culture, personal productivity is tied to moral value, as if your worth as a person can be measured by the amount and quality of work you produce in both professional and personal settings. This mindset blankets practical productivity questions in anxiety. Are you doing enough to keep your job? Enhance your marriage? Raise well-adjusted children? Maintain good health? What changes can you make to accomplish more?
Anxiety fuels the creation of products, and the tech industry has capitalized on this by producing an abundance of personal optimization tools in recent decades. You’ll find digital calendars that send push notifications to remind you of your daily schedule, platforms that treat life as a series of project-management tasks, and planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage setting daily intentions and monthly priorities. There are even self-help books that use behavioral psychology principles to help you make the most of the tools you’ve purchased and optimize both your awake and asleep hours.
Amidst these discussions about human productivity and whether it should be embraced or rejected, one fundamental truth often gets lost. There are undoubtedly tasks you need or want to complete, regardless of their moral or political implications. It could be something as simple as scheduling a long-overdue dentist appointment, grocery shopping, responding to lingering emails, or hanging curtains in your new apartment. And for these tasks, I have a single life hack to offer: the humble to-do list, written with an actual pen on actual paper.
Let me be honest: I’m not naturally organized. Most productivity advice comes from people who have a natural inclination for organization and focus. They were the kids who meticulously recorded every assignment and upcoming test in their school-issued planners. They’re the ones who send calendar invites for dinner plans a week in advance and have never let a plant die from forgetting to water it. It often feels like they were born well-equipped for life, without a need for additional assistance. I, on the other hand, have what a psychiatrist once described as a “classic case” of ADHD. My executive function never recovered from the war. I’ve tried all the tips, tricks, apps, and methods, even going so far as to purchase a box with a timed lock to keep my phone away while I forced myself to write emails. Paradoxically, this makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics commonly recommended for getting your life, or at least your day, in order.
It took me embarrassingly long to try putting pen to paper. By the time smartphones started becoming popular in the late 2000s, there was already an app available for organizing your life. Optimism filled the air, with many believing that consumer technology would help people overcome personal weaknesses and make everyday life more efficient. Didn’t a digital calendar app seem neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a task list that vibrates with push notifications be more effective in grabbing your attention? And wouldn’t it be better if all your schedules, documents, contacts, and to-do lists could be stored in one place?
But fifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be a resounding “not really.” People become accustomed to the constant beeping and buzzing of their phones, making push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. If you create a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into oblivion once you lock your phone to get some work done. While digital calendars have practical advantages over their paper counterparts, platforms like Slack and Google Docs, designed to facilitate remote collaboration, have their drawbacks as well. Trivial meetings pile up, work invades personal time without increasing efficiency, and these apps are primarily designed for the average office worker rather than accommodating the needs of those with more siloed or unpredictable work patterns.
My personal realization about the limitations of digital productivity came during the first year of the pandemic when many of us grappled with feelings of isolation and disorder. Without the routines I had constructed in my pre-pandemic life, time slipped away unnoticed, and I struggled to remember my tasks. I tried setting reminders, using various task-management platforms, and experimenting with note-taking software. None of it worked. At my wit’s end, I grabbed a notebook and pen, and opened to a blank page. I wrote down everything I could remember that was left hanging, breaking each task down into its simplest components. Rather than “clean the apartment,” I listed tasks like vacuuming, taking out the trash, and changing the sheets.
And it worked. When I made a list, all the clutter in my mind migrated to the page, and things began to get done. Even years later, I continue to use this method whenever I feel overwhelmed. I attempted to transition to using a planner regularly a few months after my breakthrough but failed. I simply need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no need to complicate it. Don’t let creating a to-do list become a task in itself.
This may sound overly simple and obvious to some. If you were born with this knowledge or learned it long ago, that’s great. But for those of us who don’t naturally possess this talent, the simplicity of this method is what makes it so effective. Your to-do list exists in the physical realm, serving as a tactile representation of tasks that might otherwise be out of sight and out of mind, buried in the depths of your laptop. It contains only tasks that can be completed within a day or two, and once you turn the page, those tasks are behind you. If you remember additional tasks after completing your list, simply add them. And if you reach the end of the list and realize that some tasks are not that important, feel free to skip them. Creating this type of to-do list requires minimal effort. It doesn’t need to be aesthetically pleasing or organized in any specific way. It’s not a plan or a strategy. It’s just a list.
If you prefer psychological evidence over the recommendation of a stranger who dislikes calendars, there is research to support the effectiveness of list-making. Studies suggest that creating lists improves working memory, and writing by hand enhances certain cognitive processes, including learning and memory. My personal experience aligns with these findings. Writing down a list forces me to recall all the tasks swirling in my mind and gives them a place on paper, freeing up mental space to focus on other things, like actually completing the tasks on the list. There are no branded tools to buy or subscriptions to sign up for. It cannot be monetized. Write it on the back of your water bill, I don’t care. Just don’t forget to pay the bill.
Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
