How To Make Your To-Do List More Manageable

I am a list person. 

I love lists. 

I mean, I looooooooove them. This love goes deep. Me and lists?

Love doesn’t get more real than us. 

I’ve been a list person all my life (my first entry in my first “diary” in second grade included a list of all the books I’d read since school started…what can I say, I’m cool like that).

But.

For a very long time, lists (especially to-do lists) were my frenemy.

I loved them, but they hurt me as often as they helped.

I would make these intense lists and then often feel totally overwhelmed by them.

Overwhelmed enough that often, I didn’t do anything on my list. Or I’d start multiple things on the list, but not actually finish any of them.

Which kind of defeats the purpose, right?

Right.

Eventually I wised up.

Now I ask myself these two questions the second I feel overwhelmed by my to-do list:

(1) Is everything on this list actually important to me?

We hide a lot of our “shoulds” in our to-do lists. We tack things on that we believe we’re supposed to be doing, but if we dig a little deeper, we realize that they don’t actually matter to us, or they don’t matter to us as much as other things. 

Think about your goals and what is truly important to you and then look more closely at your to-do list. 

I’ll bet you find a few things that you can let fall off the end without missing them in the least.

(2) Do I have items on there that are actually multiple items to tackle?

We do this a lot. 

I’m going to skip the explanation and just give you an example that I think all of us can relate to in some way.

Say I put “clean my house” on my list. That seems pretty straightforward, right? 

But is it?

Does it include that upstairs closet I’ve been meaning to get to? What about vacuuming the air filters from the heating system? Am I doing windows today? Baseboards?

Be more specific. Break it down.

Instead of “clean the house” as a single item, maybe I actually have 5 items: sweep the living room floor, mop the kitchen floor, empty the dishwasher, dust the living room, put the laundry away.

Here’s the magic of making sure you’ve broken down your to-do tasks into their actual pieces: you get credit for what you actually accomplish and that creates momentum.

In our example, what if I get to everything except the laundry? Instead of leaving “clean the house” as an unfinished task on my list, I can see that I’ve crossed out four out of five, and I can feel pretty damn good about that. 

That feeling of having accomplished something, even if not everything, keeps us feeling good. Which keeps our energy high. Which makes us far less likely to slip into unhelpful habits like berating ourselves “for never finishing anything.”

Another side benefit? It forces us to be more realistic with how much we think we can do in a given period of time.

Let’s return to our example. It can be easy to see only a single item ("clean the house”) on the list and think, “I can totally do more than one thing in a day!”

So you add a few more things. What if one of those things is “dinner”? What if “dinner” is actually: decide what to make, go to the grocery store, prep the meal, eat with my family? That’s actually 4 things that each takes its own amount of time.

Do you see where I’m going here? 

Suddenly you can find yourself with a list that looks like 3 items, but is really hiding more than can be reasonably executed in the amount of time you’ve allocated.

And nothing makes a list less like a friend and more like an enemy than when you look at it at the end of the day and feel like you didn’t manage to do any of it.

I hear the same thing from coaching clients over and over: “I’m so overwhelmed.”

And I get it. I really do. 

Every day begins with 24 hours of possibility and we want to make use of it.

Asking ourselves these two questions can cut through that overwhelm, help us prioritize, and allow us to chip away at larger goals one step at a time:

Is this actually important to me?  

Have I broken this down into its smallest tasks?

Let’s love our goals and our lists and our lives.

No more frenemies, mmmkay?

Stay curious out there.