Everyone loves (or hates) lists. If you’re like me, you might feel like you have too many of them, which leads to losing them, ignoring them, or forgetting to update them.
Something that might help is to simply make sure you have them categorized properly; there are different sorts of lists. Some of these you’ll know from GTD and related systems, others are common-place, but here’s my list of lists…
- To-do lists. The venerable, the loved and hated, the list of things to do. If you doing without this in some incarnation, you either have superhuman memory powers, are extremely stressed out, or you just don’t have very much to do. I’m guessing the second option. The danger is trying to make your “to do” list your only list. That gets overwhelming and unmanageable, and fast. My “to-do” list has become analagous to David Allen’s “Next Action” list — things to do next. That is, each item on the list must be discrete and actionable (or just doable if you prefer less jargon).
Discrete is worth elaborating on as well; a project, to use the canonical example, is not a discrete item — it is probably a whole list of “to-do” items of its own, all of which, together, make up the “project”. So projects don’t go on this list; put them on the… - Project List(s). You probably have several projects; maybe even more than you think. Again, I like David Allen’s guideline of what constitutes a project: if it will take more than one step to complete, it’s a project. Changing a lightbulb might be a project; you have to find out what sort of bulb you need, find the bulb (maybe even order or obtain one if you have none), and install the bulb (which may require a ladder, which you need to go find…).
So your project list will be more of a micro list-of-lists of its own; it may help to have a list of projects, but each “project” will itself be a list of steps, which may need to be done in a specific order. - Process Lists. It depends what you do for a living, but I can say for certain that it helps to have lists of commonly repeated tasks/projects. For example, setting up a PC for a user. This invariably involves many steps, and many separate software packages to be installed, upgraded, tested, and configured. In this example there is the additional problem of having to wait while a package installs, or while the PC restarts, thus increasing the chance that you will go do something else and then come back to the PC, at which point you may forget exactly where you are in the process…
Unless you have a list.
I would also put “daily routines” in this category. You might have a certain set of things which you would like to make sure you do every day (check voicemail, email, check server lgos for errors, back up server x, and so on). - Idea lists. Having ideas may not be part of your job description, but sooner or later you will have one — maybe many. The problem with ideas is that they tend to disappear if not recorded or acted upon, and since chances are you won’t be able to put every one of your ideas into action, the next option is to make sure to write it down.
This sort of list is pretty vague; it could include what David Allen calls his “someday/maybe” lists. It could include things that have nothing to do with your work, or your present hobbies, but that you’d like to make sure you don’t forget. - The Calendar. A calendar is basically a list, keyed to months and days. You probably want to have one of these. I like David Allen’s suggestion (rule) that the calendar only contains items that absolutely must take place on a certain date; anything else goes on the “to-do” (next action) list, or is a project. This keeps the calendar cleaner, and ultimately more usable.
- The Budget. This is something even more personal, but you probably want one. If you keep your “budget” in your head, then you probably already know that you’d be better off if it were written down. I’ll leave it to you to figure this “list” out, as I’m still wrestling with the best method of keeping track of this, myself. Suffice it to say, it helps to have one.
There are probably more that you can think of; some may be just peculiar instances of the above sort of list, or they may be a whole new type. For what it’s worth, I find that even the act of separating all these things into their own separate “lists” or areas, helps keep them all organized.
For more about David Allen/GTD, you might visit David Allen’s site, Merlin Mann’s Intro to GTD, or the Wikipedia entry.
