You may never get through them all.ĭeleting low-value, no-value, and nice-to-do tasks from your list helps you create a better to-do list because it makes your list more manageable, less stressful, and more skimmable.

And every day, the growing size of your list stresses you out. When you’re constantly adding new to-dos to your list as they pop into your head, you often end up with dozens or hundreds of to-dos.Įvery day, you have to parse through all of those items to decide what to focus on next. One of the most common problems with to-do lists is that they’re overwhelming. If you can’t figure out what value completing a task will provide, you should probably just delete it off of your list.

Delete Low/No-Value Tasks and Nice-To-DosĪnother benefit of defining the value of the tasks on your to-do list: it helps you find the tasks that probably aren’t worth doing. If you can clearly define why a task needs to be done, you’ll feel more motivated to complete it.Ģ. If you connect the tasks on your to-do list to your bigger purpose, they’ll feel less boring and banal and more important and motivating.Ĭonsider adding a sentence to every task on your to-do list that explains the value of completing that task. If that sounds like your to-do list, Markman suggests a very simple solution: reframing your list to be focused around your bigger purpose at work. If you confront yourself each day with reminders of only the least enjoyable parts of your job, it’ll probably wind up sapping your motivation to come to work. They make us miserable and sap our energy rather than motivating us to get more done.Īrt Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, says this is because our to-do lists are too often just collections of boring, stressful, or banal tasks: Note Why Each To-Do on Your List Is Importantįor many of us, to-do lists feel like shackles. If you’ve found your simple to-do list to be anything but, use one or more of these seven techniques to create a better to-do list. It doesn’t seem like a complicated practice-writing down a few things you want to get done each day-but so often it is.

My todo list