The best way to overcome this is to break them down into much smaller, achievable blocks.
One trap people fall into is to consistently avoid tackling the larger, more major projects. That means factoring in the potential for floating off onto social media or other distractions if you know you’re susceptible. Is it an email, a visit or a phone call, and for what purpose? If your to-do list isn’t clear and to the point, your tasks probably won’t get done – and they certainly won’t be prioritised.ĭetail isn’t the only important factor, however: you also need to be realistic about how long things will take if you want to construct a workable timetable for the day. It’s not enough to scrawl “bank” or “Mum” on a Post-it note, says Allen – you need more detail. “Write my novel” is a pretty foreboding task “outline first chapter of my novel” is far friendlier A system is needed – and scribbled notes on hands won’t cut it.
He believes anyone with a full schedule and no structure will struggle to cope. For time management expert David Allen – whose book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has made him a cult figure in the field –these free-spirited types are plain wrong. They think it will stymie their creativity or prevent them from being flexible with their working day. Some people resist this kind of structure, however. As Bechman notes: “Simply writing the tasks down will make you more effective.” However, when participants were allowed to make and note down concrete plans to finish the warm-up activity, performance on the next task substantially improved. The pair observed that people underperform on a task when they are unable to finish a warm-up activity that would usually precede it.
More recently, a study by professors Baumeister and Masicampo from Wake Forest University showed that, while tasks we haven’t done distract us, just making a plan to get them done can free us from this anxiety. The deed was done and the brain was ready to let go. After the dishes had been delivered, their memories simply erased who’d had the steak and who’d had the soup.
The so-called “Zeigarnik effect” – that we remember things we need to do better than things we’ve done – stemmed from observing that waiters could only recall diners’ orders before they had been served. Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was perhaps the first to note the brain’s obsession with pressing tasks. In less harried days, our memories might have done the work. “My family think I’m chaotic,” he says, “but I would be much more so without my lists – they’ve kept me in line for years.”Ĭohen puts our love of to-do lists down to three reasons: they dampen anxiety about the chaos of life they give us a structure, a plan that we can stick to and they are proof of what we have achieved that day, week or month.Ī system is needed – and scribbled notes on hands won’t cut it. Psychologist and author Dr David Cohen believes his struggle to stay organised is helped, but not entirely solved, by his to-do lists, which must be on paper – preferably in a diary – and need to be constantly monitored. It’s a time-honoured system that’s beautiful in its simplicity: work out what needs to be done and in what order, write down the tasks, do them, and then, one-by-one, cross them out. The to-do list is, in theory, the answer. But some of us struggle with the stage before that: just figuring out what it is we need to do. A lmost everyone struggles with getting stuff done.