To-do lists – many of us use them, many of us couldn’t do without them.  But do we use them effectively?  We often don’t, but there are ways to improve our use of them.

One key way is to move the items on the list to your calendar.  This will force you to make decisions about what you are going to spend your time on and when.  It will make you prioritize your list.

But inevitably you will have items left over on the list.  There they sit, in a kind of no-man’s land, just increasing your anxiety level.
What do you do about them?

Again, some advisors counsel using a time limit framework for these items, for example, allowing the items to remain on the list for no more than three days.

To get them off the list in the three days, first review what is on the list.  You can leave new items on the list alone to see if they make it onto your calendar the next day.

The other items would fall into one of the following categories:

• The do-it-now category. These are things that may take just a few minutes or less to do, such as voicemails or e-mails.
• The put-them-on-the schedule-somewhere category. These items you would put on your calendar somewhere, even if it’s several months down the road.  The thinking here is that if it is important enough to have on the list, then you must resolve to do it on some particular day at some particular time.  (You may find in doing this that there are items you think you want to schedule, but when push comes to shove, you really don’t want to put it on your calendar, or you put it on your calendar but repeatedly move it back to some other day.  If you find this happening, it’s time to face the reality that it’s something you don’t really want to do, and just cross it off the list.)
• The just-cross-it-off-the-list category. These are items you don’t want to do right now and you don’t want to put on your calendar, even down the road.  It’s time to bite the bullet on these items and just admit that, even if you’d like to get them done, it’s not going to happen.  Just cross them off the list.
• The it’s-possible category. This category is for items you just can’t bring yourself to permanently delete.  It salves a guilty conscience.  You may get to them sometime in the distant future, but you probably won’t.  But still, they haven’t disappeared down the rabbit hole.  You can pull the list out every so often and take a look at it, and sleep a little better at night.

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