Supercharge Your To-Do List

Documentation is generally talked about in the context of an organization or groups of multiple people, but right now, I am talking about just you.

By personal life, I am talking about taking care of yourself—your mental and physical health and your development. This could also mean your relationships too.

Documentation is cheaper and perhaps more effective than a coach, trainer or therapist. But even coaches, trainers and therapists will use documentation techniques to help you to get on the right path.

There are two areas of personal documentation that I think are the most worthwhile to talk about: 1) To-Do Lists and 2) Journaling. In this article, I am going to talk about personal to-do lists first.

To-Do List Best Practices

When it comes to your personal documentation, the best place to start is with your to-do list. To-do lists function in perfect harmony with the Supercharge Your Documentation (SYD) Method. (Please check out my previous blogs or my book Supercharge Your Documentation if you need any more information about the SYD Method). You capture, structure, present, communicate, and store and maintain to-do items. The one difference is that many to-do items are just for yourself personally, so you can skip the communicating step and sometimes the storing and maintaining if the item is “done” with. But there are some benefits of thinking of the full SYD cycle nonetheless.

We might think of to-do lists as just something that needs to be done that day. But the definition is broader. It should be more like Personal Projects. We are typically good at managing projects in the office, but we aren’t always as good at planning the projects in our personal lives. By “project” I mean a series of tasks to accomplish a goal. This could be: training for a half-marathon, writing a book, throwing a surprise birthday for your friend, planning a vacation, etc.

To-do lists are great at helping you to practice effective documentation practices because they reinforce effective capturing practices. Capturing is the first step in the documentation cycle and you can’t really start effective documentation practices until something is captured on paper, in a system, in a file folder—even on a napkin.

For many years of my life, I was great at work at capturing projects and making project plans, detailed to-do items, but in my personal life, I stunk. I learned through failure—or more like complete lack of momentum on certain projects—that I needed to apply the same rigor to personal projects (documenting tasks, deadlines, calendar items, etc.) as I did for work projects to get the results I wanted.

There are a lot of great tips and tricks out there. I have tried to distill some of them for you below that I have personally used and garnered from my research. I can’t profess to recommending necessarily one over the other or that I am truly an expert in any of these techniques. I would suggest that you too trial what works best for you or the situations that you need to apply it to for your life.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done

David Allen is considered the guru on to-do list management. David Allen advocates that you create lists of all areas of your life to get the “inventory” of what is out there. At first, I found it too daunting, but the more I get into it, the more I realize that this method works.

David Allen also helps solve the problem with traditional to-do lists; we typically don’t get to everything on our lists each day. David Allen teaches you to accept this as part of life. Our days are dynamic. Your boss comes into your office with an urgent request. Your kid gets sick. A potential client calls with a huge new opportunity. David Allen’s Getting Things Done method is great at providing running lists and the ability to be more adaptable. He does not advocate sticking religiously to detailed plans that you lay out each day. He advocates having running lists where items get dealt with through a mix of the context, time and energy that you have in a given period. If you only have 10 minutes between meetings, you can call to book a haircut, but you wouldn’t call a client for a discussion that you know could go on for a long time.

One concept that I struggled with is that he doesn’t really talk about priorities. David Allen believes that any activity that has your attention should be captured and dealt with in some manner no matter whether it is a “big thing” (e.g., buy a house, get a new job) or a “little thing” (e.g., buy a can opener, take the dog for a walk) even if the decision is to “do nothing.”

At first, I struggled. Why write out all that’s on my plate if I am not going to action it immediately? Why list all the unimportant things like taking out the garbage when I have important clients to deal with? This really made me think. The more I thought about it, I realized that it was brilliant. The little things in life like taking out the garbage, getting an oil change, making sure our kids brush their teeth are essential to the functioning of our life and are even satisfying in many ways. The truth is that they do have our attention whether we track them well or not. By not addressing them, we are making them harder to manage. Managing them in a haphazard way doesn’t work.

Getting your oil change may seem less important than calling back the President of your top client. But if your car breaks down on your way to meet your top client because you didn’t get your oil changed, then this will change your concept of priority. The big things and little things in your life can collide dramatically.

We need to capture information for our days to be successful. GTD is like SYD in the strongest sense because it has a huge focus on capturing and structuring information—taking information out of the mental clutter and putting it on paper and then structuring it. Structuring could mean doing the task immediately, putting it in the calendar, putting the task on a future-project list, or putting the task on a “someday/maybe” list.

5 Top Things

5 Top Things is another approach that I have garnered by a few “experts” in the To-Do list space. The approach is that you should put 5 Top Things on your list that you need to get done each day to advance your life. Now here is the catch. The things that you put on this list need to be things that you have to stretch yourself to do. They cannot be things that are in your routine.

• If you have fallen off the wagon when it comes to the gym and you need to push yourself to go, then put this on the list for that day.
• If you have to nudge yourself to make that important sales call, then do it.
• If you have procrastinated on a certain piece of work that you know you should do but perhaps don’t want to, do it.
• If you need to have a difficult conversation with someone who works for you, put it on the list.

On the flip side, if you have a great eating or fitness routine, you don’t need to put this on the list.

Unlike Getting Things Done, this method is very priorities-based. It forces you to think about what is most important for you that day for moving your life forward. It is also a process that makes you think about what systems in your life are working or not working at the time. This is a powerful way of thinking.

I personally use a combination of the 5 Top Things method with GTD. GTD is great for keeping project lists going. 5 Top Things is great at nudging me to focus on what is most important that day. I will admit that I rarely get through all 5 items each day. But even forcing myself to do 2 or 3 of the goals is better than not listing them out.

The Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo

In his book, the Pomodoro Technique, Francesco Cirillo teaches you to take control of your day by working in disciplined 25-minute time-intervals timed by a “pomodoro” (a simple tomato-shaped kitchen timer). At the end of each 25-minute interval, you can take a short break. At the end of 4 pomodoros, you can take an even longer break. You should plan and track your time spent on tasks and use the technique at getting better at understanding the amount of time that you spend on tasks.

The method is incredibly disciplined. It is phenomenal at helping you to plan your day and to improve your ability to control the time you spend on tasks. The method is also phenomenal at removing distractions in your day. This is a great technique for building focus, which is sorely lacking in today’s work world.

I will admit to having the most trouble implementing this method and sticking to it than the other methods that I have trialed. For one, the method takes a lot of planning. Secondly, I am not that good at timing tasks. But this is not a criticism of the method, but rather just an observation of my own practices and what I need to work on! I need to put this in my project list sometime soon.

I like this technique for my mornings between 5 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. and also for weekends when I am free of distractions. The technique works great for days where you have more control. For me, this is typically Fridays when I tend to have fewer meetings.

I struggle a bit with this technique during the busy work day when there are more necessary distractions. I struggle with the technique at home when there are tons of kid distractions.

I would recommend it as something to trial perhaps if you are looking to get faster in your work. You can treat it as a mini “time audit.” The method is very effective at helping people to get better at planning and assessing how much time it takes to get tasks done.

The Pomodoro Technique fits perfectly with SYD as it is focused on efficiency, reducing useless meetings, and productivity.

Scheduling Your Day in Chunks and “Sacred” Times

Planning your day with sacred times for getting things done is another To-Do technique that is something to consider and to apply your SYD skills to.

Most of us have some element of routine in our lives; we get up roughly the same time, eat roughly the same time, exercise roughly the same time. This method is about “formalizing” these times at least with yourself and as part your personal documentation systems.

The technique is great for thinking about important areas of your life and then scheduling them in your daily, weekly, or monthly calendar. You are taking care of the “big rocks” in your life first before tripping on all the little rocks that come in. These big rocks might be date night with your husband, vacation time with your family, working out, accomplishing goals, making sales calls, or writing, to name just a few.

These are often areas in which it is easy to miss these goals if we don’t plan. I typically write between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m.—if I don’t get it done then, it is hard to find any focused time once the kids get up, clients or coworkers start calling or asking for work.

I also like this technique for removing some of the planning that you need to do on a daily basis. If you have some set times that you get your workout in, sales calls, work with your coworkers, it can make the day easier to execute – with less thinking.

Most executives I know keep to a pretty rigorous planned day to remove the guesswork in their day. This is a great technique that I would recommend that you trial by planning your “ideal” day, week and month where you have scheduled chunks of what you need or want to do at certain times.

Do you like these techniques? I would recommend that you trial them out. Some techniques will stick and some won’t, but this is part of the documentation learning process. Developing a system to manage your personal to-do’s is the first step in supercharging your personal documentation to help you reach your goals, get what you want done and improve your quality of life. Looking for more information to help you supercharge your documentation? Please reach out to me too – I’d love to discuss with you!