Burkeman has a trick for deciding what's important: Take one of your existing to-do list tasks and ask 'why' repeatedly - at least five times, he says. Instead, he suggests I should break the project into smaller action items like 'call hardware store for an estimate' or 'pick out tile.'Ĥ. Burkeman says that's not a to-do list item because there are too many steps packed into one big goal.

And what ends up happening, he adds, is that 'we don't get them done because we're not expressing them in a doable form.'įor example, I want to retile my kitchen floor. People aren't specific enough when they write down items on their to-do lists, says Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. That can leave space on your list for more important tasks.ģ. If you find yourself writing 'buy more dog food' on your to-do list every few weeks, save yourself the effort of adding it to your to-do list by signing up for a subscription to get the food delivered to your house each month. 'It's not worth the bandwidth to write it down, remember it and do it.'Ģ. 'If it takes less than two minutes, just do it right then and there,' says Angel Trinidad, founder and CEO of Passion Planner, a company that sells paper and digital planners and journals. Is there a more effective way to write my to-do list? On this episode of Life Kit, I talk to time management experts about how to create action items that are clear, short and doable. Some are quick to complete, others take more time. It's hard to tell which tasks are a priority. When I looked at my to-do list recently, I noticed that it was kind of all over the place.

Creating a todo list