The Case Against To-do Lists ????!!!!??!!!
In his article “The Case Against To-do Lists (and What to Use Instead)” Nir Eyal, author of books on productivity and attention in the digital media age, advocates against to-do lists. I am a prodigious user of to-do lists. I can barely walk from one room to another without maintaining at least a mental to-do list of what I will do when I get to that room. I have too many things going on in my head at once, competing for attention, and I only survive by lining those things up in nice tiny mental or paper rows. In my opinion, the “case against to-do lists” has one item on it: I waver between preferring to write it as “to-do”, “todo”, “To-do”, and “To-Do”.
Obviously I read this article defensively, metaphorically clutching my to-do lists against my chests, white=knuckled, as I read. Eyal quickly reassured me, however, that he was not going to rip away my comfort lists. He distinguishes between keeping lists to reduce mental load and keeping lists to successfully complete tasks. Using lists to relieve cognitive load is a central tenet of Getting Things Done (GTD). You write the thing you are thinking about on a piece of paper or put it in your calendar so that you brain closes the loop on it and can move along to thinking about more important things. Writing the item down has a value even if you never do it. Eyal is not arguing that lists aren’t successful in the mental load department, but that they are not the most effective way for getting us to actually do the things that MUST be done.
He also suggests that keeping these lists of uncompleted tasks has a negative impact on our self perception. I guess it could, but I personally recognize that not everything on a list needs to be done. Some entries are more like ideas of things that could theoretically be done. I have lists, for instance, of ideas for comics to draw, but I don’t see the ratio between my ideas and my execution as a reflection of my self-worth. Instead, the length of my lists are a reflection of my creativity in coming up with things to do. Where Eyal and I align is that the challenge then becomes deciding what things on that list I do really want to do. Once I pick which comic idea I want to draw, I should file away the others and work on the one at hand, and not let all the potential ideas in the universe crowd out what I am doing. Especially if the endeavor I am engaging in is a long term one, it is easy to wonder if I made the right choice in where to invest my energy. At that point, the list of possible ideas is a reminder of all the possible avenues I did not pursue, and are a distraction from the one I am on. But the list only becomes a distraction after the decision is made. Eyal writes, “we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it is distracting us from.“
If lists are useful until you are in the process of executing an item on the list, one solution to the distraction of lists is to keep lists but create an archiving process. Once you have the list prioritized, move the list mentally or physically out of sight. You have the safety of knowing the list is there; you did not “lose” or “forget” anything important. Yet, it is not a distraction.
Eyal’s suggestion is to abandon the list altogether for “schedule building”. Schedule building means blocking off time on your calendar for what you want to be doing at that time and focusing on nothing else. A block might be for playing with your children, and during that time, you are not thinking about your “to-dos” at all. This is the same concept as Cal Newport’s time blocking. I agree with scheduling time in advance as a theory but it has never worked out for me in practice. For one, it does not accommodate small needs, things that take up less than fifteen minutes. It also does not accommodate other people very well. If I have my whole day scheduled out and my partner comes and spends fifteen minutes talking to me during my thirty minute reading block, it can feel like the entire day is now out of sync. I do not want to consider my loved ones as distractions. Some might say the answer is to tell other people to “respect your time”, but most of my relationships are more important to me than “my time”. (Also, if you have children, you know that they cannot make the decision to “respect your time”. They need things when they need them!) Lastly, schedule building does not accommodate highly variable moods and energy levels. For all those reasons, I cannot make the switch from to-dos to schedule building, even though Eyal makes a convincing case.
