I don’t need to write To-Dos or any kind of checklist, I can just remember all the important things I need to do.
Does the statement above sound like you? If yes then high-five ✋ I was that kind of person who believes writing a checklist is just a waste of time. When I started my software engineering career, I smugly dismissed To-Do lists. I didn’t think I needed the overhead, and I believed I could just keep track of tasks in my head. Within few years I start noticing the tasks falling through the cracks. I knew I had to adopt to-do lists, and they’ve since become an integral part of my workflows. It's a marvel how many things I have done just by adopting To-Do lists.
No matter how much of an expert you might be, a well-designed checklist can significantly improve your outcomes.
In The Checklist Manifesto, Dr. Atul Gawande shows how the adoption of checklists has drastically reduced errors in field after field, even for the most seasoned experts working on routine tasks. Pilots who follow pre-flight checklists, surgeons who follow operation checklists, and construction managers who follow safety checklists all eliminate large classes of avoidable errors simply by writing steps down and tracking what needs to be done.
But is there any scientific reason for that? In David Allen's book Getting Things Done, he explains that the human brain is optimized for processing and not for storage. The average human brain can actively hold only 7 +/- 2 items — the number of digits in a phone number — in its working memory. This is pretty much a small number, and if you try to remember a new phone number you will realize most people fail to repeat the digits and words back in the correct order over half the time. The only way memory champions can memorize 67,890 digits of pi is by expending large amounts of mental resources, like using the mnemonic technique to help recall the information.
If you don’t know about mnemonic techniques it is a technique to help you memorize a phrase or idea with patterns. This can include songs, poems, rhymes, outlines, images, and acronyms. Mnemonics give meaning to something ordinary to make it more memorable when you try to recall it.
Research shows that expending effort on remembering things reduces our attention, impairs our decision-making abilities, and even hurts our physical performance. And for a guy like me, that brainpower is much better spent on solving engineering problems rather than spent on remembering everything we need to do.
Here are some tips to write good To-Do lists
To-do lists should have two major properties:
- (1) they should be a canonical representation of our work
- (2) they should be easily accessible
A single master list is better than an assortment of sticky notes, sheets of paper, and emails because these scattered alternatives are easily misplaced and make it harder for your brain to trust that they’re comprehensive. Having the master list easily accessible allows you to quickly identify a task you can complete if you unexpectedly have a block of free time. Plus, if you think up a new task, you can add it directly to your list even when you’re out and about, rather than spending mental energy trying to remember it.
Your to-do list can take many forms. It can be a little notebook that you carry around, task management software that you use on the web, an application you access on your phone, or a Google Drive text file that you synchronize between your computer and your phone.
When you consistently offload to-dos to your list, you reduce the number of tasks you need to remember down to just one — to check your single, master list — and you free your mind to focus on more important activities.
Alright, I hope I can convince you enough to start using To-Dos in your day-to-day activities. At first, this might be a new troublesome habit to writes to-do lists but trust me if you were consistent with this new habit you’ll be surprised how productive you have become. 😄
