The Best (and Worst) Ways to Organize Your to-Do List

A to-do list will help you stay on track and get everything you need to do in life done; or it may be overwhelming, disorganized clutter. There are better ways to organize your to-do list—or rather, lists in the plural. Because the best option is to have several ongoing, flexible to-do lists that cover different areas of your life. Here are the pros and cons of different ways to organize your tasks.

Daily to-do list

A daily to-do list is useful because it allows you to see exactly what you need to do in a given day, reducing decision paralysis and getting you on track first thing in the morning. However, this method has many disadvantages: if something doesn’t work out, you need to remember to add it to the list the next day. Additionally, if you only focus on the tasks on your daily list, you may lose sight of long-term or future tasks that you need to complete now.

Long-term to-do list

A list that you add and remove tasks from every day is much preferable to a static daily list. As new work items arise, you can add them to the list, but sort them by time so you can focus on the most pressing needs first.

The downside here is that it will seem endless, because it is. This isn’t great for morale, so if you’re someone who gets a rush of accomplishment from crossing things off and completing entire lists, a daily grind might be better for you.

Segmented to-do lists

The tasks you have to do at work are different from those you have to do at home, from those you have to do for your children, from those you have to do at school, or from those you have to do while volunteering. work. . Each part of your life should have its own to-do list. This will prevent you from getting overwhelmed or working on something that is not relevant at the moment.

Breaking things down is key to achieving your goals, so at least break them down into different notes on your phone or notepad.

Ordered to-do list

Here’s where we bring it all together: Your to-do list needs some structure. I recommend two frameworks for prioritizing tasks: the Eisenhower Matrix and Kanban . Both of these allow you to figure out which tasks need to be completed first, based on when they are due, and what needs to be done to complete them.

This is why it is so helpful to have an ongoing list rather than a daily one. If you have a large project at work, you won’t be able to visualize all the necessary steps using a daily list. If you’re hosting a dinner party, you won’t be shopping, cleaning, and cooking all in one day—and shopping obviously needs to happen before cooking, or you’ll be in trouble. Your to-do list should be flexible and long-term, and organized by importance and time. So daily and weekly lists will leave you caught off guard.

The best way to store a to-do list

Despite all of the above, you still need a to-do list somewhere where you can view and edit it. The Notes app on your phone works great, but it’s easy to ignore. Meanwhile, plenty of research shows that writing a list frees up your mind and makes it easier to tackle everything you need to do. I recommend writing actual lists on paper and keeping them wherever you need them. For work, they lie on your desk. At home they go on the kitchen counter.

When creating long-term, flexible lists, you will have to rewrite them quite often because you run out of space, but that’s okay. Instead of a daily to-do list, try rewriting it weekly every Friday, eliminating tasks you’ve crossed off and including any new ones that pop up. Reorder the list using the prioritization method and throw out the old one, even if there are still a number of tasks on it that are also included in the new one.