To do lists are excellent. We all love a good list. We all love checking things off a list. We all love seeing all of the things we have achieved. To do lists are excellent at telling you the different steps you need to take to achieve something, complete a project or even keep the right food in the cupboard to feed your family. They will tell you what tasks need to be completed on what days in order to keep everything ticking over. But, every to do list has its limit. There are 5 things your To-Do list will never tell you.
1. It won’t tell you what is important
BUT WAIT! My app has 4 different flags for priority! MY app has custom fields and I can allocate importance to my tasks based on multiple different factors. Mine lets me sort and filter my lists and views so I can decide what IS important, filter out everything else and truly focus on what matters.
I hear you.
But think about your last week. What were the most important things you did? Were they on your to-do list?
Maybe you comforted one of your children who had a bad dream? You took a call from a friend who lost their job or a family member passed away? Perhaps a colleague who was massively stretched and stressed needed some help and you dropped everything to assist?
Perhaps, you went for a walk, either to relax, exercise or have the chance to think over a difficult issue?
I don’t know what it was in your case but I know one thing to be true, the majority of the most important things we do in our lives are not the kind of thing you would write on a to-do list.
2. It won’t tell you what you don’t already know
We write things down so we do not need to remember them. But, in order to write something down, we need to know about it. This is fairly basic but it is worth saying. Like the point above, many of the things we ACTUALLY need to do in our lives will never make it onto our to do list because we do not know about them in advance. We have to react to them as they happen. Now, some of us will write them down after the fact just so we can check them off – we’ve all done it haven’t we? But your to-do list will never tell you what you don’t know.
I am ignoring here the situation in some teams where tasks can be allocated to you by others so you might find your list for today including several things you didn’t know about before you got to doing them.
3. It won’t tell you if you have time
I can write 50 tasks on my list for today. I could write 100 or even 1000. ToDoist is fantastic but there isn’t as yet a pop or a warning to tell me that I am totally out of my mind to assume I can do what is planned for today. FYI – Amir if you are reading this, you should consider it!
Your to-do list cannot tell you how much time you have. It cannot really even tell you how much time you need. It cannot do the maths to work out the difference.
4. It cannot tell you how to manage things that are not tasks
This is VERY closely linked with point 1 above. Some things that we need to give time, focus and attention to are not really ‘tasks’ though we treat them as such. The downside of this is it trains us to be more focussed on output than is always helpful. Spending time reading and studying is valuable, even when it is not directly related to a specific output. Spending time with people is important. Taking breaks is a good thing to do. The point is simple. There are many things we need to manage, some important,. some not, that do not naturally sit in a task manager.
5. It cannot tell you when to stop
When was the last time your to-do list had nothing on it? Never? From the point of view of your to-do list, there is always more to do. It will tell you that enough is enough and you need to stop.
And sometimes, you just need to stop.
So, that’s what I am going to do now, and there are 5 things your To-Do list will never tell you
