Does anyone who recognizes himself in the persona of the article have any insights into handling long todo lists. I understand the idea if listing one task, but you inevitably have a list of dozens of stuff. So even if you make a seperate list with one to focus on, I seem to push down certain things for ever. Tending to pock and choose the easy or very urgent ones.
'thestepafter replied that "if it’s important enough to you then you will give it the time it needs", and this is technically true, but the trick is in the term "important enough". Some things are rationally important to me, but become barely noticeable emotionally (recent thought: it seems to be partly caused, or at least correlated, with the very act of putting them on the TODO list) - and remain so until I find myself in the middle of a crisis caused by endlessly delaying them. Like a flip of a switch, they suddenly become priority #1. At that point, I either give up, cross them out and take a hit, or finally deal with them, at the expense of whatever it was I was doing at the moment.
It's a really dumb pattern, but one I can't seem to break myself out. Random example - illustrative enough, but on the lighter side (as in: it often happens to tasks with much bigger consequences of failure): fixing things around the house. A broken child's toy, or misaligned piece of furniture, this kind of stuff. If I feel it'll take more than 20 minutes of concentrated effort, it ends up on the list, and... remains not done, even as my wife occasionally reminds me about it, until eventually she's so frustrated by it that I start to feel really bad, at which point the task suddenly becomes so important that I drop everything and finally get it done. For some reason, until such moment, I never feel like I can afford those 20+ minutes of focus and effort.
(Outside view: half the time, the task turns out to require less than 5 minutes of actual effort. But often enough, such 20 minute job turns out to be a half-day job. It seems that my mind tends to assume that second case will happen 100% of the time.)
Yes, it sounds dumb, but just don't. Make shorter lists.
I can only speak for myself of course, but I had this problem and I observed a few things:
- Some tasks just don't get done even if they've been listed. They are clutter.
- Some tasks don't really need to be on the list, you'll get them done anyway.
- Tasks should be actionable, and they should be considered emotionally, not just conceptually
Sometimes I'd sit down with only the intention of making a list, and then tasks come flooding into my mind, but after a while of struggling I had to observe myself and be honest, which led to paying attention to how these lists made me feel, the items but also the length.
At the end of the day a todo list is not just a conceptual list of things that belong on a todo list, it is an aid, and as such it should be actionable. If looking at it causes you stress because it's too long, it might be more accurate in what data is storing, but it is ineffective because you don't want to even look at it.
An "Actionable" list can be a short list, but a "Worth remembering" list can be very very long. Containing those things that only come to mind a couple of times a year, but when one does, it's like "Dang, I keep forgetting that".
Make sure you have a Kitchen Sink list, and give it a good long glance once a season.
I do actually have a "never" list, which is stuff that's so loaded emotionally it just lived permanently in my todo, and I resolved that if an item is there for like weeks, I can move it to another list.
The thing is I almost never look at it, so the point is really just to offload emotionally at the moment of deleting these tasks from the main todo.
Or maybe there's some psychological component I haven't learned yet for how to actually tackle one of these tasks.
I’ve heard it said that if it’s important enough to you then you will give it the time it needs. Either spending time with certain people or when working. For long lists, pick the task that’s most important to complete and do it. Then pick the next most important task and repeat.
From experience what ends up happening sometimes, and the reason why I asked, is that pushing some tasks down for too long you end up working on them too late. Causing more problems later.
