40. To Do List: Redux

Massive To-Do Lists Rarely Get Finished

Almost a month ago I started making daily To Do lists. Well, I intended to at least. This goal floundered shortly after I'd started it. The reason it failed was because I kept having these massive lists of specific tasks, many of them things that I wanted to do everyday. The problem with this is that I didn't want to make a huge list every night, and I dreaded having so many tasks to do when I awoke in the morning. Today's gift: find a better way.

As it turns out, habits are a lot harder to form than anticipated. So I've decided to try a new tactic. One that would allow me to develop a habit of getting much done, but without being overcomplicated. I could easily have dictated specific things that I want to do each day, like do 100 pushups or read at least 50 pages, but I'm going to take a page from Ben Franklin's book and just make it simple.

Is Simple Better?

I'm making a generic To-Do list that will have categories including things that I want to accomplish everyday (or most days). This will include topics such as exercising, writing, and music. I'm eliminating putting many specific tasks such as run x number of miles or learn these three guitar scales, and rather just going to have a simple yes or no if I did the topic. I'll also keep this in a spreadsheet on my computer so I can easily have record and see trends of which habits I need to work on. The list pictured is an example of what it looks like, in case you want to do something similar. A dot means that category was done that day and blank means it wasn't.

The only problem with this method is that it doesn't address the tasks that you don't do regularly. To fix that, I'm adding a category to make the next day's to do list. This can be the catch all for things like "call mom", "change oil" or "write year-end report."

You can see my categories. Anything you think I should add? What would your topics be?