Why Your To-Do List Doesn’t Work
(And How To Fix It)
How often do you write out a to-do list for the day and complete everything on it?
If you are like most people, not very often. Many time management and productivity ‘experts’ will tell you to break big tasks into smaller ones, but all this does is make an already long list of things even longer.
It does nothing to solve the problem most people face today: too many tasks, not enough time.
Why don’t to-do lists work?
Before I answer that question, there is one area where to-do lists do work; they get whatever your mind is holding on to into an external place where you can see what needs to happen. This clears your mind for a while. It helps you know you can manage even the busiest times.
Where to-do lists do not work is helping us to work on the essential things in life: our personal goals, our family and personal relationships, our health and wellbeing and our happiness.
By their very nature, our to-do lists are full of tasks and errands that do not move us any closer to achieving what is important to us as individuals. For most people, their to-do lists are full of tasks like reply to this email or that email. File my latest tax declaration, send expense report to the finance team or call client B. You would be hard-pressed to find any task related to your well-being, goals, or relationships.
I rarely see tasks on people’s to-do lists such as: “talk to my partner about what they would like to do this weekend”, “call David and ask if I can borrow his DJ equipment” or “call Jenny and ask her if she would like to go out for a run on Sunday morning”. Yet these kinds of tasks will support your health, well-being, and goals.
If you are not working on your health, well-being, and goals, what are you working on?
Okay, I hear your “yeah buts” here. We have work to do. And with work comes a long list of things that need to be done, so we are not fired. I get that.
But try something right now. If you have a to-do list, add up all the tasks you have on that list for this week and divide that number by the number of work-related tasks. Then multiply that by 100 to get a percentage.
If you are like most people, you will find that more than 80% of your to-do list tasks will be work-related. Do you think that is right? Do you think that is a great way to live your life? More than 80% of what you do each week is related to what you are employed to do. I hope not.
The real problem with to-do lists is that they promote the slow destruction of your life.
They become a source of stress and overwhelm, and they do not support you as an individual; they support your employer, who will pay you only enough to keep you from leaving.
Is that how you want to live your healthiest and most productive years, working on someone else’s goals at the expense of your own?
If we break down a 168-hour week, you will find that most people work an average of forty hours. That is usually eight hours per day over five days. That still leaves you with 128 hours. More importantly, your forty hours are only 24% of your week, yet you likely perform more than 80% of your tasks in only 24% of the week. Something is very wrong.
If you put in a fraction of the effort you put into your work on your personal goals and tasks, you would see an immediate improvement in your relationships, health and overall happiness.
