“I hate my to do list!”

I’m not a fan of to-do lists. They’re the antithesis of effective time management.

To-to lists don’t distinguish between items that take a couple of minutes and things that take half a day. They don’t help with when or how to get stuff done. They’re just there. Screaming, ‘Do me!’.

When I’ve used to-do lists in the past, they’ve just made me feel more stressed out. Every day, that list was sitting somewhere – in my bag, in my notebook, on my phone – as a reminder of all the things I HADN’T done.

Those unticked items just hung around, silently judging me, making me feel lazy, unaccomplished, unproductive, not good enough. “I could be doing more”, “I should be doing more”, “I’m not efficient enough” blah, blah, blah.

To-do lists also focus on the urgent, rather than the important. Important stuff gets shoved down underneath tasks that are easy, boring, process-y and of the ‘please can you do this asap?’ variety. But for our own personal growth and progress, we need to make sure that our longer-term goals are also on our radars. To-do lists simply prevent us from even thinking about that stuff. Life gets in the way, right?

But should we get rid of the to-do list altogether? How will we know what’s got to get done without one?!

No, we shouldn’t simply banish them to Room 101. However, we need to rename and reframe the to-do list. It should be a holding area for information that you are then going to move somewhere else to maximize your chances of completing the tasks.

As such, I’m a big advocate of the “to-allocate” list. This is a to-do list with purpose. In a to-allocate list, you write down your tasks, estimate how long each will take, and assign a priority level to them. Then, you transfer those tasks to document with actual time slots.

This could be anything – a diary, a calendar, a planner, whatever floats your boat.

When you put a task into a time window, you’re creating space for it, making an appointment with yourself to get it done. It’s not floating around on a judgemental, annoying, generic ‘to-do’ list.

Instead, it’s there in a neat little slot, it’s going to take you 20 minutes and you’re doing it between 1100 and 1120. Boom!

I have a great “One Thing At A Time” planner, which is in my Free Student Resource Zone. You can download it for free, so give it a try.

What are your favorite planning tools, both free and paid? Drop a comment below to let us all know what we can discover!