Self-governance via to-do lists

Improving effectiveness via benevolent dictatorship

I make various lists on 3x5 cards, and I find this practice to be crucial to my life. From both my reading and my personal experience, I have learned that I am not very good at retaining or recording information using my brain alone. Instead, I am better off using my scarce mental resources for making decisions or doing something creative with what I am thinking about. Making lists, particularly lists of tasks to be done, lets me get that kind of information out of my head, and allows me to stop devoting energy to remembering it. Later, rewriting the list or revising it allows me an opportunity to reengage with each of the items: is this still important? How does it compare with the others?

Daily process

My daily self-management works pretty well. A to-do list allows me to work through the day with relatively little energy devoted to the question of what I should be doing. In principle, I just glance at my list to remind me of either what I’m supposed to be doing right now (if I’ve been distracted) or what I’m supposed to be doing next (if I’ve reached a point where I’m done with the current task or pausing it).

Even if I decide that the item that “should be next” is not what I want to do next, I both (1) know that I’ve unambiguously made that decision, and (2) know how my choice relates to my previously set ranking. Typically, I choose to do something a little lower down on the list, or I’ve decided that something new has preempted the item(s) at the top of the list.

Following this discipline, I can be confident at the end of the day that I have used my available time in the best way that I can. That’s helpful, since I rarely accomplish as much in a day as I think I will. Knowing that I did my best is nice, as a counter to any sense that I fell short.

However, that confidence requires that I avoid distractions, which rarely happens. With some regularity, I get distracted when I’m using the internet. One theory is that I should put some kind of mechanical limit in place to avoid these distractions: for example, I could lock out internet access except for specific times of day. Arguing against that plan is the unfortunate reality that many of my tasks require some amount of internet access, and that it’s not always easy to segregate the “good” internet from the distractions. Indeed, sometimes my conclusion at the end of a distracted segment is that I have learned something important or worthwhile, and that the distraction was okay.

A similar kind of reassurance arises from a “done” list, which I occasionally keep: a running list of what I have accomplished, regardless of its status on the to-do list. Although I may not have made enough progress on my “big” goals, it’s still helpful to record that I paid a bill, made a phone call, put away a file, or any number of similar modest tidying-up tasks.

Growing list

At a larger scope than a single day, I’m less convinced that I have things under control. Potential tasks tend to proliferate, and the to-do list grows accordingly – potentially without bound. My ambitions of what I would like to do always far outpace my capacity to get anything done. There is some part of me that doesn’t want to acknowledge my limits in terms of capacity and time (I’ve written previously about a similar problem with my ever-growing backlog of books to read.)

In the short term, a to-do list helps me navigate the day and to feel better about how I’ve spent the day. In the longer run, the length of the list can become overwhelming. The most extreme version of this, which I no longer try to do, is where I would have a list for everything that I thought I was trying to do and would recopy it every day. This process was eventually limited by my inability to fit everything onto a single 3 x 5 card, even with very small writing and a very fine point pen.

Happily, I recognized that the boundary imposed by that medium was a useful limit, and that I should not switch to something more flexible. I did not succumb to the madness of using software tools or devices to automagically keep such a list. With such a shift, it would have been possible to maintain a much larger list that did not need to be recopied, and more items would not translate into smaller writing. However, having an even-larger number of items that propagated themselves from day to day would not have been an improvement, and might even have been hazardous for my mental health. Even if it didn’t drive me crazy, it would still eventually prove impractical to review and prioritize an unbounded number of items.

Longer term

Ultimately, we must grapple with the reality that we can want to do many things, but there simply isn’t enough time. (Of course, there may be other limits too, such as money, or the inability to be in more than one place at a time.)

Every person’s inherently limited lifetime is the core of the observations in the helpful book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It’s a rebuttal to the all-too-common position where one imagines that with the right techniques, with the right tools, one will eventually take care of everything, following which one will have leisure. This theory is, of course, unworkable, and is obviously silly once it is brought into the light and examined carefully.

Instead, what’s required is to decide that leisure is itself an important value – not an important task, because I don’t want it on the same list as all these other things I’m trying to get done – but, instead, that leisure should have a status perhaps like sleep or eating. One doesn’t “get around to” sleep when one “finds the time.” Or, rather, I might well be opportunistic on some days about exactly when I sleep, but I don’t get to defer my sleep for multiple days because I want to get other stuff done.

There doesn’t have to be leisure every day, or even leisure every week, but there needs to be some notion of time that is not focused on the to-do list. There is a somewhat related notion that time spent doing nothing can be highly productive. (I’ve previously written about some related aspects of meditation.)

Mapping activities to times of day

I find that I have addressed this need for leisure mostly implicitly, as I have grown older and I have figured out my most effective times of day for various activities.

At breakfast I read, which is typically a form of leisure for me. So almost every day I manage to get a little leisure in, even if there’s a lot to do.

I know that in the morning I am creative and incisive in my thinking, and accordingly that is the best time for me to be doing original work or otherwise creating something. (Early in my career, I learned from one of my mentors about the merit of living a few time zones east of most of one’s collaborators. His version was that he lived in Scotland and worked for a company headquartered in Boston; I have reprised the same idea by living in Boston and working for companies based in California.)

A little later in the day, I am still reasonably intellectually competent, but perhaps not with the energy to be creating entirely new things – so that’s a good time for me to edit my work, or perhaps to critique the work of others. Still later, I enter a zone in which I’m not necessarily very good at anything intellectual, but I can probably still do many things that don’t require much brain power. That’s a great time for meetings in which I might occasionally need to respond or intervene, but I am neither running the meeting nor presenting.

And by the end of the day, I’m kind of a vegetable: I’m primarily seeking some form of entertainment (a movie, a TV show, perhaps a play). I can turn to that entertainment knowing both that I can’t realistically expect to do good work again until I’ve had some sleep, and that some leisure is good for me.

My to-do lists allow the time between my morning reading and my evening entertainment to be productive and defensible against any hectoring from my internal critic. That productivity in turn allows me to enjoy the leisure without guilt.