Your Brain on To-do List - DBR 043

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

What to do if our primary tool is not really helping us? I argue that this is the case with our to-do lists. I’ll talk about why and what you can do about it. To Do Busy Right, we are fighting three enemies: interruption, multitasking, and distraction. Distraction is the most difficult to defeat. To-do list is another tactic to deploy in that fight. Everybody knows about to-do lists; most everybody uses them. In my experience, they are by far the most common tool. But we don’t do detail on them; we don’t have a vetted process. You don't hear about doing them, right? But you don't hear about them in the same way you don't hear about toothbrushes, because it's taken for granted. I think that you need to have a list. It’s good to get things out of your head. But there are better and worse ways. Somehow, there's got to be something where I have my tasks written out. I think implementation of this can vary a lot. The problem that a to-do list should solve… Cal – not a quote, but from A World Without Email - [We] try to pick this ‘congealed mass’ of expectations, tasks, and commitments apart. We do this because we want to figure out what to DO. General steps for creating a To-do list

• Generate the items (how do we ‘know’ what is on the list)
• Put it somewhere (generally calendar or paper)

Part 1 What goes on the list

• Normal ways to generate the list: 1) make it up from scratch daily or 2) collect it from various places.
• Make it up from scratch
• From scratch – Q: what’s the problem? A: it’s a bad question for our brains
• The first part gives us brainstorming – “what COULD I do today?”
• The second part gives us urgency (only)
• Priority is always situational, contextual, and relative.
• Collect the things from multiple places
• This usually means a lack of a clear, repeatable process
• It's easy to forget the odd places – everything needs to go to one place.
• The challenge of multiple places – sub-prioritizing by source – pick and choose and leave everything else there then everything downstream is ‘filtered’
• BTW, if you’re not sure you have a good process, take a look at Attention Compass.

Part 2 Where to put the resulting things Now, you’ve created your list; you need to record the result of that work Two general ways to do this – on calendar or on paper

• Either way, these 'lists" are fragile and unwieldy

The first way - On paper

• Sorting the list (and re-sorting) is bad. Sorting is a hard exercise for your brain
• If you don't believe me, take the sorting challenge
• With the list, you’re putting your brain into a sorting situation – minimize the number of times you have to do this.
• “On the same piece of paper” is a category – but it ignores context
• What do we do when we don’t finish our paper list?
• Often we set that piece of paper aside for in the morning – another place to collect from
• But, are yesterday’s priorities automatically today’s?

The second way - In your calendar

• The calendar is a bad place, no better (really) than paper It's: too fragile, 'must begin at', and has no sense of probability.
• If we either run short or run long, then the Calendar tool begins to show its weaknesses - fragility
• When I say ‘fragile’ I mean it ‘shatters’…
• A list is a static, steady state tool - What to do with “pop-up” priorities?
• The assumption when we make the to do list is, well, if nothing else pops up, this is my plan – how’s that working for you?
• Regardless of what you say, you have to deal with some people’s emergencies
• Ideally, we would have less fragility

Bottom line – with creating a to-do list, we set all kinds of brain challenges (the bad question, multiple collection areas) Our medium (paper or calendar) also presents challenges. We have a bad process. Instead of 'to-do list' think “backlog” What’s a backlog?

• Definition
• It's in one place.
• It is continuously sorted
• It is never complete
• It is fluid, so less fragile
• Why a backlog cannot be on paper
• A proper backlog takes care of this for us. It’s built into the AC backlog and processes

What a backlog does for us

• Processing takes care of the sorting
• Deals with fragility
• The “next thing I need to do” is already in the backlog
• Daily review takes care of the overnights and the calendar

If you want to solve these problems once and for all, let me know. My clients have pre-decided, recorded those decisions, and they follow that. They think "I’m going to flexibly pursue the highest priority items in my backlog while attending to my calendar and 'pop-up' priorities." They can do this calmly with minimum hassle. They use a backlog. What did we accomplish in this episode? So when we’re fighting distraction, we’re using a rusty sword (to-do list). If we fix it (move to a backlog) we’re using an upgraded weapon in the fight to Do Busy Right