Throw away your to-do list

I just love tweaking how I deal with my productivity levels. It’s probably not good for productivity :) … In the past, I’ve run many experiments like waking up at 4 am, hooking up my todo list with Trello, etc, etc. I came across this article it recommended throwing away your to-do list. The article points out, “All those undone items lead to stress and insomnia because of the Zeigarnik effect” [1][2].

Their recommendation is to simply use the calendar to plan out your day. Each task to the minute. Now for someone in a leadership role dealing with many people, it sounds unrealistic but I am willing to experiment.

It actually kind of does make sense. I do keep going back and forth between my calendar and a to-do app. If everything could just sit in one place that would be great. Plus if I plan my day out I might actually get stuff done.

I am thinking of adding in another rule. Close all tabs before moving on to a new task. I feel that has been a much bigger time sucker for me. As I am switching tabs if I happen to have another tab from a previous task. I get sucked into it again. Which brings me to another problem of our generation. Finishing a task! As professionals, we are getting worse and worse on finishing things. We are so distracted by our phones, emails, tabs, slack pings that our attention spans are dipping as a race! [3].

Today is my second day using my calendar as a To-Do list and I’m having a blast crushing things. I’ll post an update on how it has affected my work in 2 weeks.

Does anyone use their calendar as their TODO list?

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/13-things-ridiculously-successful-people-do-every-day-bradberry/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect [3] https://www.aarp.org/health/brain-health/info-2017/mental-focus-smartphone-use.html