Life’s To Do List

Thanks to the Inter­net, we are con­stantly inter­con­nected to each other and our means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, among other things, is pretty solid.  Inter­est­ingly enough, just because com­put­ers and phones have made life a lot more effi­cient, it doesn’t mean I have less to do whatsoever.

For me, it means I could do a lot more with my time.  And the amount of stuff to do is essen­tially end­less.  There is no ‘off but­ton’ to life and I embrace that.  The amount of stuff to do will never end.  We can’t just sit still for very long, there’s always some­thing; we’ve got lad­ders to climb, peo­ple to see, high­est selves to ful­fill, and so forth.

Some­times we make lists to help us out.

Think about the times you used a shop­ping list.  Didn’t that make things much easier?

Instead of casu­ally brows­ing the store aisles, if you have a list, you know what you want so you walk with pur­pose.  If you get dis­tracted, all you have to do is to look back at the list.

Life’s To Do List

So why make a list only when it’s time to go shop­ping? What about mak­ing the rest of your life as easy as that?

Our lives are full of poten­tial and how will they ever be real­ized if we don’t jot down those awe­some things we have to do?  You don’t have to be the stereo­typ­i­cal “busy busi­ness­man” to use a to-do list, plan­ner or calendar.

The same way you would walk with pur­pose through the super mar­ket, you could walk with deter­mi­na­tion and pur­pose through­out the whole of your life, mak­ing you much more pro­duc­tive and full of gratification.

How to start a to-do-list for LIFE (work, school, hob­bies, etc!)

There is no best-way to go about doing these things since we are all dif­fer­ent and there’s a mil­lion ways to do this, but there are sev­eral tips I could share to guide you.

1. Choose your medium and keep it simple.

Prefer­ably, choose some­thing you could take with you all the time and add to on the fly.  I take advan­tage of the fact that I always have my phone with me and use my iPhone’s basic Notes pro­gram to main­tain a list.  Be wary of fancy apps or com­plex sys­tems as they may eas­ily take up more time to man­age and main­tain than is necessary.

If you don’t have a smart­phone, go back to the basics and have a pen and paper with you. Some­times there’s noth­ing bet­ter than jot­ting down tasks on paper and adding ideas as things pop into your mind through­out the day.

2. Keep your list vis­i­ble or always on you!  If you put away your to-do-list, you will prob­a­bly for­get about it.

If you decide to use your com­puter to main­tain a list, keep the list open all the time.  Pur­posely place a short­cut on your desk­top, start menu, on the quick launch (or pinned to your taskbar in Win­dows 7) and keep the file open… get the idea?  You keep your web browser open for count­less hours at a time, so why not sim­ply keep your to-do list open all the time as well? In other words, I’m telling you to prac­tice the oppo­site of “out of sight, out of mind!”

3. Split your list into two sec­tions: High pri­or­ity and nor­mal priority.

High pri­or­ity items are things you want to get done urgently or today.

Nor­mal pri­or­ity items are every­thing else.  Through­out the day, I often remem­ber new things I want to do and get fresh ideas and I will imme­di­ately whip out my phone and add it into the list.  Some­times I’ll have a third sec­tion at the end which are super ran­dom but fun things such as “Find a tree to climb, go horse­back rid­ing, roller blade, etc”.

4. Do the most fright­en­ing or chal­leng­ing task on your list FIRST.

Due to subconscious-self-sabotage, you will want to put off the hard­est (or most fright­en­ing) task off until later (or for­ever).  If you get that done first, you will not only feel great about your­self but the rest of your day will feel like a breeze.

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” – Lao Tzu

Just remem­ber that with baby steps, any­thing is pos­si­ble.  If a task seems too daunt­ing or over­whelm­ing, break it down into smaller steps so that it becomes a lot eas­ier to deal with.  Once you build up some momen­tum, the iner­tia will carry you through­out the day and every­thing gets pretty awe­some once you get in the zone.

It feels great to get things done in an effi­cient man­ner and there’s no rea­son to stress when a sim­ple list can keep us on track and pre­vent us from feel­ing scat­ter brained.  I would love to hear any tid­bits you got that help keep your life orga­nized since we all have our own per­spec­tive on things and can teach and learn from each other to lift each other up.