My TODO list.

For over last half a year I was trying to find the best way to organize my small and average tasks. During that period of time, I was testing plenty of both on-line and stand-alone applications, very often having average benefits from using them. In the end, I didn’t find any application that was really satisfying me.

Most of available solutions offered a lot of nice features. But a lot of them weren’t so useful for me and they made things only complicated. I found out that I don’t need to organize my common tasks into any groups, subtasks, projects etc. I don’t need any steps, phases and milestones, dependencies or relations between tasks and other functionalities that might be useful for huge projects.

What worked best for me was the simple list in Office document.

I was writing new task one under each other and I was removing those, that I finished. Nice and simple. It was working for me very well. For a long time I even didn’t think about improving it.

The next step was moving my TO-DO list to the piece of paper. This way I didn’t have to turn on my computer, each time I had to access to my TO-DO list. That helped a lot. Early in the morning, before leaving home, I am able to quickly go through my list and plan tasks that I want to do, today. In the evening I enjoy taking my list and review it while sitting on sofa. Having my list on paper I was more eager to experiment with it.

Currently, everyday in the morning I add one vertical dash near each task on my TO-DO list. That helps me to see, which tasks are way too long on my list. If one task has a lot of dashes, it indicates me that I probably have problems with finishing it and I postpone it all the time. So I spend few minutes on thinking about reasons for that situation. Then I usually visualize how I solve this task. I create in my mind multiple paths to reach this goal. Both possible and impossible paths. It helps me to get the strong feeling of doing this. I am trying to find myself very confident performing this task. Later, when you would be in the middle of this task, bring your positive feelings from the visualization. Awareness, confidence, safety. It really helps.

Another advantage of my TO-DO list is a satisfaction I have, while removing done tasks by crossing them out. Seeing list full of finished task is a nice source of motivation to do more and more. You simply want to finish all your tasks. This is very good feeling and strong force increasing productivity.

On the other hand, seeing tasks with multiple dashes is very, very annoying. I don’t want to have such tasks on my list. I need to take them out, by completing them, of course. This is also very smart effect brought by my TO-DO list.

Of course I don’t claim that my way of tasks organizing is the best one. It works well for me. It may also work nice for you. Maybe you find it useful or inspiring. Just try it or any of my ideas. Each one of us has different needs, so there is no possibility to develop universal TO-DO list. You have to experiment a little, try different approaches and techniques. Eventually, you will find something that fits to you. Or maybe you even don’t need such a list at all.

If you have your own TO-DO list or you are a happy user of such an application - post about it in comments. I will be very grateful for any ideas and feedback.

 This post was published in past on MindEssential.com, my previous blog that is currently off-line.