How effective is your to-do list? Does it help you plan your day? Does it nudge you to prioritize the right tasks? Or is it a never-ending list of things you feel guilty for not having done yet and now you’re not going to do any of them?
A good to-do list should serve you. You should not be at its mercy.
A practical to-do list sets you off in the right direction each day and helps you focus on the tasks that are most important to you. With the right strategies, a to-do list can help you achieve larger goals, too. Here’s what you need to know to make your to-do list work for you.
1. Choose the Right App (or Paper)
The first step in making a better to-do list is deciding where to keep it. You could certainly create one in a to-do list app, but there’s nothing wrong with paper! If paper works for you, great. A simple spreadsheet or word processing document is fine, too.
Apps for keeping to-do lists have several advantages over paper, however, and it’s good to at least know what they are:
- Apps have built-in reminders.
- It’s easier to edit a digital list than one written in ink.
- You can’t lose a digital list that’s saved to the cloud.
- Apps let you quickly change the view of your tasks to sort them by priority, due date, or alphabetically.
- Digital to-do lists can be collaborative, meaning you can assign tasks to other people and get notified when they complete them.
- Some to-do list apps include features that might motivate you, such as a beautiful design or a gamification element.
Which app is best? There are so many to-do list apps to choose from. You could lose an entire day exploring all the options. I’ve tested dozens of them, and the ones I recommend the most are Todoist, Asana, and Things.
A few other options that are great in certain circumstances are Google Tasks for its Google Workspace integration, Microsoft To Do if you use Office or Windows 10, Habitica if you like gamification, OmniFocus for those who add a lot of detail to their tasks, and Trello if you’re a visually-driven person.
Recommendations are helpful, but ultimately, choose an app or notebook that speaks to you. You will likely look at your to-do lists quite often, after all.
2. Make More Than One List
Make more than one to-do list. All great to-do apps let you make multiple lists. Start out with a few that are easy and obvious: work, personal, and household.
Having more than one list helps you focus. When you’re at work, you don’t want to be distracted by your personal list. When you’re at home, you don’t want to be burdened thinking about your work responsibilities.
Don’t hold back. Make lists for everything you think of! The useful ones will stick around and you can scrap any that end up not working for you. Some other common to-do lists people make are:
- shopping list
- someday (where you write down unimportant tasks that you might do someday)
- weekend (for anything you want to do on the weekend but don’t want to be distracted by during the week)
- chores for kids
Remember, you can add new lists or rename them at any time.
3. Jot Down Tasks as Quickly as Possible
When a new task pops into your head, write it on your to-do list as quickly as possible. Adding tasks as soon as you think of them prevents you from dwelling on them. Once it’s written down, you don’t need to remember it anymore.
If your to-do app has some kind of keyboard shortcut for adding a new task, learn it. If your app has a mobile phone shortcut, set it up.
For those using paper, you might keep a sheet of scrap paper near you while you work to write down thoughts quickly and then copy them neatly onto your official lists later.
4. Assign Due Dates
Any time a task has a due date, add it. Due dates help you prioritize.
Not every task needs a hard and fast due date, but sometimes it helps to add them anyway. Assigning due dates is effective for two reasons.
First, most to-do apps let you see what’s due today, tomorrow, and later in the week, regardless of which list they’re in. This way, you can see everything due today and get a sense of how the day will go, or take a moment to reschedule if you’re feeling overwhelmed just looking at everything due within the next week.
Second, by giving tasks due dates, you’re effectively planning out your week, which is an excellent time-management strategy.
5. Revise Your To-Do Lists Daily
Start every day by throwing an eye over your list for the day and assessing whether it’s reasonable. Then, revise it.
If you have too many tasks scheduled for the day and you know you won’t get to them all, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
6. Limit Yourself to 3-5 Tasks Daily
What is your daily task limit? It depends on what kinds of tasks you write down and how difficult they are to complete.
For most people, I recommend starting with three to five tasks. It might not sound like a lot, but if you focus on writing down the three most important things you need to do today, you might find it’s actually plenty.
Over time, track how many tasks you check off each day (the best to-do apps track it for you) and you’ll get a sense of your maximum. Once you know your max, you can limit your daily assignments to a reasonable number.
Here’s the problem with getting too ambitious and writing down 12 or 15 tasks for one day: If you don’t get to them all, then you have to defer them to another day, which means re-prioritizing and changing some due dates. That’s more work that causes more stress and can feel self-defeating.
Instead, by having a small number of tasks, you’re more likely to finish them each day. The more you finish all your tasks, the better you’ll feel about your to-do lists overall. That positive feeling can fuel you going forward.
7. Put Tasks on Your To-Do List, Not Goals
What you write on your to-do list matters. Put tasks on your lists, rather than objectives and goals. To do that, you have to know the difference between them.
Goals are big-picture achievements or desired outcomes. They’re usually difficult to quantify. An example is “become fluent in Hindi.” Putting that on your to-do list wouldn’t be very effective.
Objectives are markers on the way to reaching a goal. It’s much easier to confuse these with tasks because objectives are more specific and quantifiable. An example of an objective is “be able to hold a conversation in Hindi about my favorite movies for three minutes.”
So what are tasks? Tasks are the actions you take to reach an objective. Break an objective down and you have your tasks. Very often they’re single events (though they can repeat). A task might be “learn three new Hindi verbs” or “study for 30 minutes.”
Tasks—not goals or objectives—are what belong on a to-do list.
8. Keep Goals and Objectives Separate
In a perfect world, many of the tasks you get done each day will be in pursuit of a bigger goal. You should know what your goals are, but you don’t need to write them on your to-do list.
Instead, write your goals and objectives somewhere else. It might be in your to-do list app or notebook, but not on the list that you look at each day. Some other places to write down your goals are in:
- the notes section of your to-do app, if it has one
- a note-taking app, such as OneNote, Evernote, or Joplin
- a journal
Refer to your goals from time to time. Check in on them and revise them. Just don’t let them distract you from the specific things you need to do today.
9. Look at Your To-Do List Often
A looked-at list is a used list. An effective to-do list guides you throughout your day, which means you have to look at it often. Look at it each morning to mentally prepare for the day ahead. Look at it after lunch so you know what else you need to focus on for the rest of the day.
Additionally, make a weekly habit of looking over everything you have planned for the coming week so that you can better plan your time and make adjustments in advance.
When you feel lost in a task or need a break from it, look at your to-do list for something small and easy (a less demanding task that doesn’t require high focus) that you can tackle in the meantime.
The more you look at your list, the more you’ll trust it. The more you trust it, the less you have to remember what tasks you must do. The less you have to remember, the more you free your mind to focus on the task at hand.
10. Make Your To-Do List Scannable
If you look at your to-do list often, you’ll quickly realize how helpful it is to see what you need at a glance.
Use tight language or shorthand to write your tasks. Many apps have priority ratings or stars you can add that let you highlight crucial tasks. Color-code your tasks if that helps. Apply icons that give you more information about the task, such as whether it requires a phone call or is related to healthcare. No matter how quickly you look at your to-do list, you should be able to reap a lot of information about what needs to get done.
Check Those Boxes
A great to-do list is at the heart of personal productivity. It’s such a joy to find a task-management app and process that works for you. Checking off items on your list gives you a feeling of accomplishment and is a key element of getting organized. A reliable to-do system makes life both easier and less stressful.
