How Sharing to-Do List Can Help You Be More Successful
As more of us work remotely these days, more and more digital task managers are offering collaboration features such as sharing specific tasks, commenting on tasks, and creating shared to-do lists within your team.
This post originally appeared on the RescueTime blog .
I took these features for granted as they became more popular, but I never really thought about how useful it was to share my to-do list. Sometimes it’s just necessary so that your colleagues can see what you’re working on or communicate as part of a common project.
But what about if you have the option to keep your to-do list private or make it public? Why would you share your tasks if you don’t need to?
Share your tasks by letting others help you accomplish them
Xander Schultz believes so strongly in the benefits of task sharing that he built an entire app out of the idea of shared to-do lists. The Complete app was sadly closed later, but Schultz made a strong case for sharing your tasks even if you can’t use his app to do so.
Schultz says that “the to-do list is really a to-do list.” Our to-do lists are usually full of things we are not ready for yet but hope to get to someday. This is where the public to-do list really matters, according to Schultz, because others can see what you plan to do in the future and offer support and advice before you need it.
While sites like Yelp, Quora, and Amazon are useful for gathering tips, we tend to only browse these sites when we’re ready to take action and then spend hours comparing reviews and discussing what to do. Schultz says it’s best to make your tasks public before you’re ready to complete them:
A public challenge gives people the opportunity to nudge you for advice and motivation before you have to look for a solution.
Let’s say you need to buy a new set of headphones, for example. This task can languish on your to-do list for months without any effort. When you finally decide it’s time to do this, you can spend hours researching different brands and models and comparing reviews.
With a public to-do list, Schultz says you can get recommendations from friends and followers about their favorite headphones long before you even think about trying to find one for yourself. What you put off for an hour (or more) could turn out to be a ten-minute assignment based on the advice and suggestions of trusted friends.
A public to-do list can also be useful for reaching longer-term goals, Schultz said. He set a goal to lose weight, which he struggled to reach by the appointed timeline, but with every new update he added about his progress, friends and followers offered support and helpful advice. Schultz says it doesn’t matter if he didn’t achieve that goal, because sharing his successes along the way and getting help to keep going was worth it there was a public goal he didn’t achieve.
Making your to-do list public will make it better for you.
When software developer Joe Reddington released his to-do list , he thought it would be a small and simple step towards personal transparency. He strives to be transparent and wanted to take one more step to prove this commitment.
He had no idea how much this decision would affect his productivity.
Publishing your to-do list will force you to write a better to-do list than you would otherwise, according to Reddington :
… When you write a problem that someone else needs to read, you tell them what really needs to happen, but when you write it for yourself, you leave yourself a cryptic note.
Once he posted his to-do list, Reddington noticed several problems with it: repetitive tasks, tasks written as questions, and tasks that were simply poorly written. Reddington took some time to clean up his list and rewrite most of his tasks so that anyone who reads them would understand them. This made it easier to start each task and made it easier to complete, so Reddington is now more productive simply because his to-do list is more meticulous.
I can honestly say this was the most effective change in my productivity in at least two, and possibly five years .
Reddington says it doesn’t matter who views his public list, or even if someone looks at him. Just make it public:
… the number of people who look at it doesn’t really matter – all I need to know is that someone can, and that’s enough for me.
Sharing your goals is more likely to achieve them.
Finally, one thing we can all agree on is whether you share simple goals or long-term goals, you probably want to accomplish them. That’s the whole reason you put them on your to-do list, right?
Well, here’s the good news: if you share bigger tasks and goals, you’re more likely to accomplish them.
In a study involving 267 people, participants were divided into groups, each of which was given different instructions to achieve the goal they wanted to achieve. Some simply kept their goal to themselves and privately worked to achieve it. Others wrote down a commitment to act towards that goal and shared their commitment with a friend. The latter group shared their commitment with a friend, but also sent him weekly progress reports.
Of the 149 participants who completed the full survey, 70% in the weekly update group either met their goal or advanced more than halfway to completion. 65% of those who shared a simple commitment to action with a friend also made it half way or reached their goal by the end of the study.
But of those who kept their goals secret, only 35% were able to get it halfway.
This is not the only study demonstrating this effect. A 2016 review of 138 different studies found that we tend to do more of what we planned when others can track our progress.
However, there is one caveat on this score. It is best suited for action goals where the focus is on completing a task or getting something done . For a goal-based identity, where the emphasis is on changing the kind of person you are, or being different, sharing your goals can backfire .
When we tell a friend about a goal, we need to be different from others – for example, to be a best friend – we tend to feel like we’ve made progress towards our goal just by talking about it. Which, unfortunately, reduces the likelihood of real action to achieve this goal.
So double check what goals you have before discussing them, but if you have an action-based goal or a big task to complete, sharing your progress can help you achieve it.
You may not be ready to share your to-do list with the world like Joe Reddington did, but simply sharing a goal or task with a friend can be just as beneficial.
Sharing your to-do list will force you to rethink how it’s written and give you some accountability for your progress. It also provides an opportunity for others to share their advice and experiences with you to help you get things done.
An occasion for sharing your to-do list | RescueTime Blog