This could be the millionth time I’ve written about this topic, which then begs the question, do I know what I’m talking about? And also, why all this chatter about to-do lists?
Do you believe in making lists? Not like believing religiously, but you think that they are useful tools for managing your work? Not grocery lists, which ensure that you don’t forget the milk that you went to buy. But a list that says, here are the things you need to get finished.
A to-do list is a curious thing. It's supposed to present a list of the obvious, because your short-term memory cannot be trusted to control what you need to do in a prioritized manner. Remember, it’s not a grocery or shopping list, it’s a list made up of stuff that you need to get done.
For example:
• Discuss terms of surrender with lawyer
• Write 1000 words for blog by 1:00 PM
• Buy gift for boss’ birthday – remember he does not drink
• Call mechanic and settle payment
Now, that’s a do-able list. My problem is that if that’s what my list looks like on Monday, by Friday it will be twelve items long. Here’s how that will happen. I may do two of the items on this list on Monday, but on Tuesday, I’ll add four more. That’s six. Of the six, I’ll get two more done and on Wednesday I’ll add four more. That’s eight items on the list by Wednesday. And so on.
By the end of the month, the list is pretty much useless. There are too many things and there’s no sense of what should be done first and what should be done next. Another habit of mine is that I tend to not finish what I start. So, the list may have indented sub-lists. Here’s what the mechanic list item will end up looking like.
• Call mechanic and settle payment.
◦ Called Monday @ 1:30 PM, we couldn’t reach an agreement on the brakes.
◦ On Tuesday, mechanic said I could use cheaper tyres – we agreed.
◦ Mechanic found something behind the carburetor, won’t be getting the car this week and the cost may go up.
◦ Settled on a payment plan
And that’s even shortened. When I called the mechanic about the tyres, he may have told me he’d get back to me with a list of possible good, but cheaper, tyres that I could use instead. And so the tyre part of the list indents again and goes off into deep space.
THINKING ON PAPER
It’s a digital world and we live in front of screens. Some of us type fairly productively and so it’s easier than handwriting. And that’s also part of the problem. If the list was on a piece of paper, editing it and adding spurious stuff wouldn’t be so easy. I used to keep a small (smaller than A6) notebook specifically for jotting stuff that I would normally forget. Because it’s handwritten, there’s a huge economy of words, you don’t write down every word, only a few words that will jog your memory when you see them.
And you cannot insert easily on a handwritten list. You may be forced to rewrite the entire list at which point you will edit it and not copy over stuff that doesn’t seem to be moving.
However, on a computer (and I use Microsoft OneNote) it’s too easy to select the entire last list, copy it and then paste it to your new page on a new date. You can then track items that live for the longest time.
The physical, manual, slow process of handwriting is a curse and a blessing. You cannot sort or organize your to-do list without having to rewrite the entire list. And so you are encouraged to make sure that the list isn’t so large, because you will have to shuffle things around. More importantly, you struggle to keep it to a single sheet of paper so that you can see everything at a glance. What this means is that when you have new stuff to go on the list, you have to remove some other stuff. You simply cannot turn the page and continue. If you do that, completed items get in the way of items that are in progress. But having the list on paper and being forced to rewrite the entire list when you are shuffling, or adding, or deleting is a formal sort of review. At some point you’ll have written that you need to finish a particular item sooner than later. And week after week it keeps cropping up. After you’ve physically written the same item, in the same prioritized position a few times you should start feeling defeated. Disappointed. Frustrated. And you refuse to put it back on.
TECHNOLOGY MEETS PAPER
Introducing E Ink. This is the same technology used by black-and-white digital e-book readers and now they’re making notebooks out of them. This is super interesting technology but it can easily also be abused. I own two of them, a BOOX Note Air 3 B/W and a Supernote Nomad. Google them. I bought the BOOX towards the end of 2023. The first device was a colour one, which I returned disappointed mainly by the battery life – my paper notebooks don’t need to be recharged so I didn’t want to recharge this notebook more than once a week. I returned the colour one and got a black and white one which was much, much better on battery life. When Ratta, the company that makes Supernote Nomad (and the new larger A5 Supernote Manta) released the Nomad, I bought one. Had I bought the Nomad first, I never would have bought the BOOX Note Air 3 B/W.
These E Ink devices are not cheap, but they are excellent for portable journalling and note taking. The batter life is measured in days, not hours, and especially the Nomad has a surface that’s really close to paper. Not exactly like paper but close enough.
My lists are now in the limbo world between paper and computer. Only time will tell how long this lasts.
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