More To Do Than Can Ever Be Listed
Things to do today include exploring the history of the to-do list (alternate link). You’ll find that they were famously used by Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci, among other high achievers of history. Below are some more modern approaches to to-do lists to explore—or even try Which format seems best to you?
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Eisenhower Method | 1-2-3 Method | Ivy Lee Method
4-D Method | Eat that Frog | Must-Do | Bullet Journal
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"The list is the origin of culture," Umberto Eco famously proclaimed. (Leonardo da Vinci, John Lennon, and Woody Guthrie would have all agreed.) But the list, it turns out, might also be the origin of both our highest happiness and our dreariest dissatisfaction. So argue New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. The article overviews the book's third chapter, titled "A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey". Filled with anecdotes and pieces of cultural mythology, the authors interwoven history with ample psychology experiments from the past century to give insight on how to make the to-list a tool of fulfillment rather than frustration.
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Revelation #1: Benjamin Franklin
He demonstrated one of the greatest pitfalls of the to-do list: trying to do too much at once, letting different goals come into conflict with one another. Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: 'Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.' When, as a young journeyman printer, he tried to practice Order by drawing up a rigid daily work schedule, he kept getting interrupted by unexpected demands from his clients -- and Industry required him to ignore the schedule and meet with them. When your goals conflict, you have more disorganization instead of efficiency.
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Revelation #2: General anecdote
When a psychologist was invited to give a talk at the Pentagon on managing time and resources, he decided to warm up the elite group of generals with a short writing exercise. He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words. The​
only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: 'First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.' the authors argue this is a simple version of an important to-do list strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term
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Revelation #3: Drew Carey
​Comedian Drew Carey took a different approach to mastering his to-do list -- he outsourced his strategy to productivity guru David Allen, who taught him how to
adhere to specific next steps rather than abstract larger goals. In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik effect and explains phenomena like earworms -- when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can't do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.
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The Eisenhower method utilizes the principles of importance and urgency to organize priorities and workload. This method stems from a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Eisenhower did not claim this insight for his own, but attributed it to an unnamed "former college president."
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Important/Urgent quadrant tasks are done immediately and personally
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Important/Not Urgent quadrant tasks get an end date and are done personally
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Unimportant/Urgent quadrant tasks are delegated
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Unimportant/Not Urgent quadrant tasks are dropped
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The 1-2-3 Method
The 1-2-3 Method is a simple productivity system that organizes your day around one main goal, two urgent tasks, and three maintenance or supporting actions to reduce overwhelm and increase focus.​ The 1-2-3 Method is designed to help individuals cut through distractions and decision paralysis by prioritizing tasks in a clear, manageable hierarchy. It encourages focusing on one essential goal, completing two urgent or important tasks, and maintaining three routine or supporting actions each day, creating a structured yet flexible approach to daily planning and productivity.
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Benefits:
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The Ivy Lee Method
The Ivy Lee Method, developed by productivity consultant Ivy Lee (he is very interesting) in the early 20th century, is designed to help individuals and teams improve their productivity by focusing on a limited number of tasks each day. The method gained popularity after it was successfully implemented by Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, who found significant improvements in productivity among his executives after using this technique.
Bullet Journal
A bullet journal, also known as a BuJo, is a mix of a daily planner, to-do list, and diary. The bullet journal is an analog journaling system created by New York-based designer Ryder Carroll. He describes this planner/journaling approach as a method to "help you track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future." Unlike traditional organizers and planners, this method encourages authors to examine how their goals, tasks, and responsibilities make them feel. Instead of a standard checklist, bullet journaling requires daily, monthly, and yearly reflections along with bullet points and asterisks, and whatever makes you feel a sense of accomplishment. Usually BuJos include index, monthly log, weekly log and daily log. People decorate it with washi tape, calendar stickers, stencils and other.
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​To save time, use rapid logging, the official language of bullet journaling where you trade full sentences for short phrases or keywords. Adopting this shorthand ensures peak efficiency and organization a.k.a. a prettier, more productive BuJo..
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Tasks: •
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Events: O
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Notes (facts, ideas, and observations): —
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Priority: *
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Inspiration (mantras, insights, and ideas): !
It’s easier to remember things we didn’t finish than those we did. That’s why a song that got interrupted might nag at you until you hear the end of it, ooh na na—or why you might be unable to keep an overdue assignment out of your head even when you’re taking a break. Psychologists term this the Zeigarnik Effect. Discuss with your team: how can we use the Zeigarnik Effect to our advantage in tasks like preparing for the World Scholar’s Cup? Would we be healthier if we spent more time remembering the things we got done—keeping a “done list”—than the things we didn’t?
The Zeigarnik effect (named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik) postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after professor and Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed that a waiter had better recollections of still unpaid orders. However, after the completion of the task — after everyone had paid — the waiter was unable to remember any more details of the orders. Zeigarnik then designed a series of experiments to uncover the processes underlying the phenomenon. The research report was published in 1927, in the journal Psychologische Forschung. The Zeigarnik effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect, an urge to complete tasks previously initiated.
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​​The Zeigarnik effect suggests that students who suspend their study to perform unrelated activities (such as studying a different subject or playing a game), will remember material better than students who complete study sessions without a break. The Zeigarnik Effect makes a powerful case against multitasking. Focusing on one task at a time will avert intrusive thoughts of unfinished work that will only create delays in finishing all the tasks. Completion of each task approached sequentially instead of simultaneously will clear mental space for the next task.
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How many of us feel this way: Starting off each morning in a kind of "productivity debt", where I struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes.It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things", in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head. ​ --- What if you worked on the basis that you began each day at zero balance, so that everything you accomplished – every task you got done, every tiny thing you did to address the world's troubles, or the needs of your household – was like a gold star on our productivity. Another way to look at staying afloat on our sea of tasks and priorities.
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The author, Oliver Burkeman, declares the benefits of keeping a "done list", which starts empty, first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day. But a done list isn't merely a way to feel better about yourself. If you can give up the impossible quest to pay off your productivity debt, and instead start thinking of each day as an opportunity to move a small-but-meaningful set of items over to your done list, you'll find yourself making better choices about what to focus on. And you’ll make more progress on them, too, because you’ll waste less time and energy being distracted by stress about all the other stuff you're (unavoidably) neglecting.
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“The list is the origin of culture,” the writer Umberto Eco once said. He held an exhibit of lists at the Louvre (which should have improved security on its own to-do list); he compiled a book on the topic, too. Learn about Eco’s distinction between practical and poetic lists and consider—what kind of list is a to-do list? Then discuss with your team: are we more drawn to lists than we should be?
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Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
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Eco writes that even the most ardent lovers of ancient literature tend to steer clear of one section of Homer's Iliad. This is the poem's second book, which is euphemistically known as "The Catalogue of Ships" – but is in fact dominated by a 350-line list of the various Greek forces that made up the "coalition of the willing" in the invasion of Troy. ("Fierce Ajax led the Locrian squadrons on . . . Euboea next her martial sons prepares" and so on, and on.) Most readers find it hard going, and skip it.
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In The Infinity of Lists Umberto Eco sings the praises of Homer's "Catalogue" and of a vast range of other lists in western culture. At the very beginning of European literature, Eco argues, Homer offered us two ways of seeing the world. On the one hand, there is that open-ended list of military forces, with all its indeterminacy and hints at infinity. On the other, later in the Iliad, there is a description of the magnificent shield, which the god Hephaestus made for Achilles, with the whole of the cosmos (from the stars in the sky to the sheep in the fields) represented within its frame. This is "finite form", a closed and bounded world, with nothing outside it and no possibility of addition or accretion. Eco leave us in no doubt which style of representation he prefers: the boundless list.
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Eco has a capacious definition of the list, from museum collections, art, to even music. But throughout the book one particular worry nags at Eco's enthusiasm for the sheer profusion of meaning and the uncontrollable excess, which he sees as the defining feature of the list as a genre.
So, do lists actually help keep us on track or are they a burden for our mind and added stress? I for one am always starting lists and they never end up the same way as I imagined.