Making lists is a ubiquitous practice: it is done throughout the world by just about everyone between the ages of 9 and 99, from high school students to university professors; from heads of companies to heads of households.
Whether maintained on a PDA, jotted down inside a small spiral notebook or scribbled on the back of an envelope, the to-do list can be a friend, foe, manager, dictator, companion and confessor – sometimes all of the above, sometimes all at once.
While creating a list of things to do seems in itself a fairly easy task, making efficient and productive usage of that list turns out to be far less so. Valiant list-makers who find that they are constantly, even hopelessly, chasing to keep up with their own lists are not alone. According to time management and organizational expert Mark Forster, despite its appeal, the to-do list generally does not work.

“There are two main reasons why,” writes Forster in his blog, ‘Get Everything Done’. “The first is that you never get more than a third of the way down the list. The second is that for every item that you cross off the list, you think of another three items to go on it.

While creating a to-do list with all of our wishes and intentions can be a cathartic process that feels like a brand new start, this fresh feeling generally doesn’t last. As the day goes on, most people find that their list was born out of wishful thinking rather than realistic planning; an impossible mission from the get-go. It is possible that on some level they never actually intended to complete all of the items on their list, in which case they unwittingly set themselves up, if not for failure, then for a no-win situation.

Open Lists

This problem of the unrealistic, impractical to-do list is compounded by the usage of what is called an open list – one that continuously grows as the day progresses. The constant increase of tasks denies a person the ability to properly plan his or her day, thus causing that feeling of always running behind.

Forster fan and blogger Luciano Passuello describes how such a list can morph from something like a seductive array of candies to a “giant blob of threatening commitments.” While the act of making the list causes the creator to feel a momentary sense of control, as the list begins to grow, the person starts to feel out of control – of the list and of their life. Whatever tasks they now manage to carry out are done mainly so that they may cross them off the list. In an ironic twist, rather than the list serving one’s life, one’s life becomes servile to the list.

To counter these and other difficulties caused by the open-list mentality, Forster has developed a few simple techniques which he describes in his book “Do It Tomorrow”.

First, he says, we must deal with the backlog of unfinished tasks that have built up in the absence of a well-oiled time-management system by filing them away, out of sight. Later, once we have put a DIT system in place, dealing with the backlog items will become an achievable task of tomorrow that invites success, rather than an unfulfilled task of yesterday that allows only for failure…

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