My To Do List Thesis

A Method To My Madness: Getting Shit Done

Written on 9/29/2022-10/12/2022

Version 1.1

December 2023 Note:

Since my original version of this essay I no longer use Trello, I not exclusively use Notion and run with very little metadata, basically only a due date and priority within a day. I’ll update this essay properly someday, but for now the ideas and principles are still a solid starting point.

October 2024 Note:

Updating this Essay has not been on my to do list (clearly). I still don’t agree with everything in here anymore (and some of it is cringe frankly) but it is still the best starting point I can offer to others.

July 2025 Note:

This is never getting updated, I’ll write a book instead, ha!

November 2025 Note: 

My list of additional ideas/thoughts/changes almost exceeds the length of the original essay itself at this point :'(

Introduction/Core Ideas

Yes, I had some fun with this, enjoy

• What is a To Do List?
  It’s a list of things to do.

• Who Are To Do Lists For?
  Everybody; everybody has things to do.

• Why Use a To Do List?
  They are a great enabler of success for getting things done.

• When Should To Do Lists Be Used?
  Always. I guess not when sleeping.

• Where Should To Do Lists Be Used?
  Everywhere, it comes with you everywhere you go.

• Still Not Convinced?
  Well dearest reader, keep on reading

  • Logos Response
    To do lists are an effective way to figure out how to use your time effectively, you can treat them as an extension of your brain that you can easily critically examine and alter. That is an incredibly valuable opportunity.

  • Ethos Response
    In 2016 I made a to do list on my phone in Trello and I have refined my craft of that ever since. I attribute a lot of my industriousness and long term successes to my ability to have clarity on the tasks I need to accomplish.

  • Pathos Response
    Here, have a series of premises that lead to a decisive conclusion which definitely appeals to the readers emotions:

    1. To do lists are a source of organization

    2. Therefore; to do lists are be used by people who stay organized

    3. People who know what they are doing, are organized

    4. Those people are confident, because they know what they are doing

    5. Confidence is attractive

    6. Therefore; using to do lists has a direct correlation to attractiveness

    7. Therefore, therefore: you should use to do lists

  • Also, decluttering and organizing your mind by getting it into another form is a great source of peace and an opportunity for continuous self examination.

• Have a Goal
  Have a project statement, are you doing this to stay organized? What does that actually mean? If you have leading goals/principles for why you have and use a system, you will gain metrics that you can judge said system against. With that, you can see where the outcomes differ from your goals and begin course corrections.

• My Goals
  There are the key tenets that I seek to follow and judge my to do list processes against:

  • I don’t want to forget cool and interesting ideas, I want to write them down for later

  • I don’t want to be overwhelmed by not having oversight over everything I need to do and by the fear of forgetting something

  • I want a framework that will help enable me to reach my long term goals via small bite-sized tasks

• Be Honest
  It is very important in all planning to be very honest with yourself. In the space between planning and executing plans, it is easy to find dissonance. Your plan may say that you want to achieve something, but you can’t bring yourself to get up and go do it. Being openly honest with yourself when you lay down and prioritize tasks will enable you to make more realistic plans and reveal to yourself any changes you might want to make in your prioritization.
  This mainly applies to your prioritization of a task, but also applies to your perception of the amount of time tasks take and how much you can accomplish in a day.
  Another big part of honesty is optimism, being too overly optimistic will leave you with things you cannot accomplish. Not that optimism is inherently bad, but held in healthy moderation, such that alternatively pessimism is not your driving force. A productive alternative to over-optimism is challenge. Instead of being optimistic that you can accomplish ABC by XYZ date, challenge yourself to do so, it brings the ball back into your court and weakens your own ability to rely on excuses if failure occurs.
  I always perceive self honesty as something I should urgently pursue because if it is taken too lackadaisically it can result in negative spiraling. Lying to yourself fills up your plate with things you can’t do, that makes you feel bad, when you feel bad you wont have the motivation to go back to square one and solve the root of the issue. Therefore to enable success, being self-confrontational through honesty is a high priority.

Trello: The Tool of Choice

• What is Trello?
  “Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application and is developed by Trello Enterprise”
  Trello is both an app and web based tool that automatically syncs across everything. It implements the use of Boards, Lists, and Tasks (called Cards in the app) very seamlessly and efficiently.

• Why use Trello?
  It’s good, it’s fast, it works well.
  According to my phone tracking for the last few months, Trello is open on my phone for at least half an hour every day with me opening the app an average of about 50 times a day.

• Commitment to One System
  Commit to using one piece of technology, don't mix Trello with a bunch of other stuff, avoid collecting a ton of paper lists.
  There are of course caveats to this rule:

  • Chore List, sometimes when doing a list of tasks, you don’t want to be near your phone because it will distract you, having a separate physical system for this works well. I write down items from Trello on paper for this case.

  • Clarity of thinking visually; a linear list can be prohibitive in appropriately visualizing information, a blank piece of paper to get your thoughts in order can do wonders.

  • Speed/Brain Dump; it can be faster to write things down by hand on paper if a lot of information is flowing at once, then transfer to digital format later.

  • Inappropriate Phone Usage; it’s not always a good time to pull out your phone, write down info in another way and transfer later.

• Easy Access
  Pin your main Trello Board to your phone home screen for the fastest possible access. Being able to add new information in or read information out as quickly as possible will enable more fluid use, which in turn will make your system more friendly to use. The counterpoint that proves the point being that if you had to carve all of your to do lists into stone and bury them just to dig them up to read them or change them, you’d be having a real terrible time, seek to do the exact opposite of that. Remove Roadblocks.

• Notion
  Notion is the other organizational tool that I use. It is a wiki-builder with many similar functions to Trello. In Notion I build and collect larger and more long term items. It is conducive to more long form output. For example, this Thesis on To Do Lists was written in Notion.
  I also use it for organization at work. Doing so is a bit easier because technically my task priorities are set by others. I just have one huge to do list, than as tasks are completed they are organized into project buckets per day so I have an archive of all my work completed.

Boards

The modern equivalent of the humble bulletin board

• What is a Board?
  Boards are a collection of To-Do Lists, side by side. They can have any number of Lists on them, and any number of Boards can exist.

• How Many Boards Do You Need?
  The answer is 2.
  The real answer is 2-ish.
  At least I use two main Boards.

• Choice of Boards
  So what are the two Boards that I actually use?

  • My Active Board
    This is the one board that I actively interact with. On it live the To Do Lists filled with tasks that I actually actively want to do.

  • My Archive Board
    This Board is for storage of ideas/notes/tasks from my main Board. Regularly I move things from my main board to this one because I don’t want to forget them for the future, but also have no plans on working on them actively any time soon.

• Chapter Theory for Boards
  One concept that I find useful is this idea of your current Board representing a Chapter. Getting a refresh every now and again, building your system up again and cleaning out tasks, with a different visual theme then before, can be very productive. A chapter is quite literally a chapter of your life. For example, by current Board is called ‘JAX Chapter 4’, I’m in the fourth chapter of living in Jacksonville. So Chapter 1 was me moving here, Chapter 2 was the day it actually really sunk in that I moved here, so on and so forth.

• The Other, Non-Active Boards
  Now here are the exceptions; I have more than just two Boards on Trello. They just don’t get used nearly as much as the main boards, probably at minimum a 1000:1 ratio. I have a Board for my car maintenance, group projects, music, writing, organizing events, archives of previous ‘Chapter’ boards, etc.

Lists

So we’ve covered Boards, now what the heck do you put on your Boards?

• What is a List?
  A list is a collection of tasks, notes, reminders or ideas written above one another.

• The Types of Lists I Subscribe To

  • Tasks: Near Term
    This type of list is what actually get used day to day. This is where today happens.

  • Plans: Far Term
    This is where plans for the next few weeks come together. Tasks get moved from these lists to your active near term lists.

  • Memory/Notes
    Lists of things you want to remember but aren’t necessarily actionable in the near or far term, if at all.

• The Lists That I Currently Use

  • A List for Every Day for the Next Week
    I have one list per day for the next 5-7ish days. For each day I have a bunch of tasks, when a task is done, I archive it. At the end of the day, I either have all tasks done, or move unfinished ones to the next day, then archive that list.

  • Two Lists for Future Tasks and Plans
    I have one list for things I vaguely want to do in the week after the current one and then one for things I vaguely want to do in the next month.

  • Help/Gems
    This is a list of notes that are reminders to myself of important concepts and ideas as well as a collection of things that delight me and I want to have nearby.

  • A List for Music Notes and Ideas
    Mainly ideas and interesting things I come across to contribute to my music making.

  • A List of Things for my Friends
    Things I want to do together with friends, ideas for fun times.

  • Additional Lists That Appear
    Often I will have a long, non permanent, ‘Tasks/Ideas To Be Sorted’ List where I dump a lot of tasks/ideas from my brain and from other lists of tasks that aren’t urgent/important/pressing/immediate. Then at a later time I go through this list and sort the tasks into the correct lists or archive them to my archive board.
    Sometimes there will be other ‘Notes’ Lists (I just happen to currently only use lists for Music and Friends), for example:

    • Ideas for Projects

    • Things to do for my Car

    • Things to do around the House

    • Personal Plans

    • Social Plans

Tasks

So we’ve covered Lists, now what the heck do you put on your Lists?

• What is a Task?
  A task is the notation representing an action that you would like to do in order to accomplish some goal.

• Types of Tasks

  • The 2 Minute Task
    If you have a task that is 2 minutes or less, i.e. ‘Check to see if I need to buy more eggs’, just do the task. The only reason to not do such a task immediately is if you physically cannot currently do it. Like for the previous example, if you are not currently at home to check your fridge. Planning, organizing, and sorting such a small task is going down into too much detail and is counterproductive to actually getting things done. If it’s more work to add it to the to do list than to just do it, just to it.

  • The Two Types of Tasks on This Earth
    Tasks are either externally imposed on you, or imposed upon yourself, there is no other option (everything in the universe either is or isn’t a potato). Externally imposed tasks have external stakeholders, so their deadlines may be much more serious than your self given tasks. For example; paying bills, a birthday party, helping someone move to a new apartment. When others are dependent on you it adds pressure and accountability. I personally don’t use this to my advantage very much, but it is a viable strategy to have others keep you accountable.

• Good Writing for Tasks

  • Actionable Tasking
    Tasks need to be actually actionable tasks written with a verb. You can’t write “New Shoes”, you can write “Buy New Shoes”. This subtle difference can be very beneficial in actually getting the ball rolling on accomplishing a task.

  • Concise Writing
    Be concise, don’t be verbose. You can add detail to the description section of a task if you please. Just be sure you can read and understand the task at hand quickly.

  • Break Down tasks
    Break tasks down into smaller and smaller chunks if you find you can’t bring yourself to get started. Make one task into ten if need be. Masterpieces get painted one brushstroke at a time.

  • Clarity
    Make the task detailed enough so you can't confuse one task with another. If I am working on my car and going to help a friend woodwork on the same day, “Grab tools” doesn’t do me any good. Why? What tools? It needs to be unmisinterpretable.

• Prioritizing Tasks

  • Are Deadlines Real?
    Does this task I’m writing, actually truly, 100% based in reality, have a due date or deadline? Or is that something I’m making up to create pressure on myself to complete the task? Surprisingly few things actually have deadlines, often that feeling is more so to maintain something, to keep a feeling of progress, or to prevent decay.

  • One Big Task Per Day
    You can only really do one big task per day. The caveat for that is sustainability, you can always do more than one big thing, but likely at the sacrifice of the following day.
    So what is a big task? Going to work is a big task, going on a 6 hour hike is a big task, going on a day trip is a big task, repainting your house is a big task. The simple rule of thumb is that 8 or more hours is a big task.
    "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest” -Robert Owen
    Not every day has one big task. For example on weekends, frequently there are more several hour, mid sized, tasks. For example shopping, an afternoon event, dinner with friends, etc.
    The importance of recognizing when something is a ‘Big Task’ is that it takes a large amount of time and energy in your day, but can exist in a single line in your to do list. This asymmetry in actual size to perceived written size can easily lead to overfilling a day with tasks. Not every list every day has to be the same length of actual tasks, however unintuitive/uncomfortable that may be.

  • Your Written Priorities Must Match Your Actual Priorities
    Be critical, honest, and confrontational with yourself about what things you actually truly want to accomplish. There are more ideas than time. If there is dissonance between what you feel and what you write down, it can end up counterproductive and sap motivation. If you aren’t happy with your genuine motivations, don’t lie to yourself by writing something better than reality, confront what you aren’t happy with.

  • Do Important Things First?
    Should you do important things first? I honestly don’t know. It’s lauded as a good idea in that ’you get the difficult thing done and out of the way’. I personally have more of a natural feeling of ‘this task should be done in this part of the day’, it depends more on my energy levels than relative importance. I’ll bundle similar tasks or tasks done in the same area or same way together.

  • 6 Things Per Day
    You only really do 6ish things per day sustainably (this principle stems from the Ivy Lee Method). It isn’t a steadfast rule, but generally true for medium-sized tasks, and it is a great starting point for estimation of what you can accomplish. This trend of only being able to deal with 6-8 things is interestingly recurring.

• Getting Shit Done

  • The Initial Hurdle:

"I want to do this" -> "But I'm Scared" -> "Do it scared"

• • Building Momentum With Easy Wins
    Checking tasks off is a good feeling, throwing some easy fluff in for an easy win isn’t necessarily a bad strategy as long as it aligns with and doesn’t distract you from your overall goals. Take an easy win, especially when it motivates you to do more.

  • Timers
    I employ the use of timers frequently
    I find it to be important for the timer to not be my phone timer, so that I don’t get sucked into the wormhole of notifications
    There are several main functions for which I use a timer: speeding up tasks, lowering the barrier to entry for tasks I don’t want to do, and sustaining long periods of productivity

    • Speeding Up Tasks
      If you only have 3 minutes to take all the trash in the house out, doing so will be a lot faster and more efficient in no time. You’d be surprised by how many things actually don’t take much time at all when you force yourself to approach them in that mindset. I find this is often most useful for tasks you must keep repeating in your everyday life, i.e. trash, laundry, dishes, etc.

    • Lowering The Barrier To Entry For Things I Don’t Want To Do
      Some things take 2 hours, some things take 30 hours, having to do only 10 minutes of that makes it much easier to start; better to spend 10 minutes a day for half a year to finish something than to give up because you can never get the thing started in the first place

    • Sustaining Long Periods Of Productivity
      This one ties in to the previous idea a bit, by using a timer to force a switch between several tasks, things like mundanity, discomfort, annoyance, and road-blockedness can be kept under control. Simply adding variety to bad things can be enough to get more longevity out of a single unit of time/energy (whichever you find to be the more limiting factor)

  • Music
    I find that the right music sets both the tone and tempo for work I seek to complete, typically with no vocals to minimize active listening.
    I often also use it as a catalyst to begin work, sometimes to a point where I know I will not do something unless I have music playing to support that task.

• Checklist For Making a Task
  All of these questions don’t necessarily need to be answered, some are irrelevant for certain tasks, some questions are far too in depth for the level of task being done

  • [ ] Is the task actionable? Is it written with a verb?

  • [ ] Is the urgency/deadline for the task coming from you (internal) or others/events (external)?

  • [ ] How long do you think it will take?

  • [ ] Do you truly care about doing this as a task, or are you actually just noting it down?

  • [ ] Is your perceived deadline the actual true deadline? Does it matter?

Maintenance

‘Research suggests that 80% of January gym-joiners quit within five months.’ How do you make sure that you aren’t one of them?

• Maintaining your Board/System

  • Commit For a While
    Follow and commit to a system for a while before making a change, you’ll learn more deeply what parts of it are not working for you beyond just surface insights. Also giving it a chance may make you warm up to it.

  • Don’t Futz With It Too Much
    Changing your system a lot will result in becoming disheartened, leave it alone, it can’t ever be perfect.

  • Time Planning Vs. Time Doing
    Don't spend more time on making your to do list than doing the items on your to do list. That doesn’t make sense.

  • Pause
    Take a break when you need it.

• Maintaining Lists

  • Maintain List Item Overview
    If you have to scroll to read your while list, your list is too long, you’ve lost overview and losing that can introduce stress. This isn’t a hard rule at all, but just something to be mindful of; having a long list can be overwhelming.

  • Regular Critical Examination of Lists
    Every few weeks, step back and look at the lists you have, are you using them? Are they cluttering your available space? Are they cluttering your thinking? Fix any issues that you see. I recommend making many small changes over time instead of large ones, they are easier to digest without great upset.

  • Don’t Go To Bed Wondering
    Review and plan your list for the next day the night before, don't go to bed with things for your brain to still chew on, and then don't wake up without having steady footing to step out onto. It’s an easy and powerful way to gain both restfulness and a motivated start.

  • Divide Up Your Day
    Imagine your day as different chapters or scenes in a movie, divide up your day as such. Given no other outside influence, natural divisions for a day are meals, your day before lunch, after lunch before dinner, and after dinner. I split my days into 2-3 chunks with a line (three dashes in Trello makes a line), for example the end of the workday.

  • Resetting The Week
    I usually have 5-6 Days of to do lists planned out, so every 3-4 days, I add more lists for the next days such that I don’t reach the end.

• Maintaining Tasks

  • Closing The Loop On Time Estimation
    My neighborhood has communal mailbox areas where many residents mailboxes are all together. Comfortably walking there, getting my mail, and coming back takes 7 minutes. Going by bike takes 2 minutes. Having those pieces of information readily available to me makes decision making much more straightforward. ‘Can I afford 2 mins quick to grab the mail?’ or ‘A 7 minute walk to get some fresh air and grab the mail sounds nice.’ Shopping is a big one on this list, so many people underestimate how long shopping takes. Knowing the true length of a task can either convince you to just get it done, make sure it doesn’t conflict with other time-sensitive tasks, or let’s you know that it needs to get broken down into shorter actions.

  • Regular Purging of Tasks
    Purging and prioritizing need to be a regular tenet of your work. I do this every 3-4 days for my plans for the coming week, and a purge every few weeks for the rest of the board.

  • Don’t Delete the Future
    Don’t delete items that you’ve changed your mind on tackling, move them to your archive board for future reflection.

• Being Mindful of Tiredness
  You can only do so much in one day. That being said, you can do more if you are able to use your energy throughout the day more effectively to avoid tiredness. If you exceed your limit, you’re done, you can’t do anything else until you rest. These are the ways I find that tiredness manifests itself and strategies to help manage it:

  • Physical Exhaustion
    In our modern lives it can be rare to be properly physically exhausted. I usually find this to be the case after things like long hikes, exercise, or being on my feet all day. On the days that this isn’t the case, it is more likely that mental willpower to do physical work is the limiting factor, not actual physical exhaustion. Knowing that this is true enables pushing past it.

  • Decision Fatigue
    Imagine if I forced you to make a series of 100 life changing decisions (which country to immediately move to, where to invest 90% of your assets, etc.) in one hour. You'd be exhausted. That's decision fatigue. Decisions are difficult to make, they require us to think deeply and broadly, trying to predict the future. Therefore, if you make lots and lots of decisions in one day, you will feel tired. To combat this there needs to be a concerned effort to minimize decisions, so you can both focus on the important ones and also not get tired from making so many throughout the day. These are the ways I solve this issue:

    • Trust my gut instinct to make decisions for me. For things that are ultimately not huge decisions I find that my first instinct gives me good results.

    • Decide that it's not a decision, it's just something I do. If X then Y. When you go to your car to drive somewhere, you grab your keys, it’s something you do, it’s not a decision to be made. Build more of those automatic actions.

    • Bundling decisions together. Decide what to wear or what to eat for several days. This takes less energy than making the decisions independently.

    • Delay decisions until I have enough information to make it easily. This goes back to knowing what deadlines are real. It can be difficult to let go of making a choice earlier rather than later, but this can be very effective.

    • Frame the seriousness of the decision more mindfully, will the outcome affect your life tomorrow? Not really? Then don't spend so much time deciding, just go with something. If you make the wrong decision, making it the next time around will be really easy.

    • Just ask someone else and commit to following their suggestion.

  • Exceeding Mental Capacity
    Related to decision fatigue but something I find to be less common; using your brain a ton in one day and getting exhausted in that way. The good thing with this is that you can do menial things if you still have an itch to accomplish something. I find that it is best not to push too hard against this.

  • Pushing Beyond Your Circadian Rhythm
    Your body will get tired if you ‘stay up past your bedtime’. I don’t find it to be worth it to disrupt good sleep in order to just ‘get things done’. Respect yourself.

Pitfalls/Future Work

Coming to terms with the fact that no system is perfect is vital to peaceful continuation, so what do I know that I am not doing perfectly? Every pitfall is an opportunity for improvement.

• Far Away Singular Events
  This system is not a calendar, it is weak to singular events far in the future that can’t be built up to, like remembering to renew a yearly subscription on the third Tuesday of March. Creating some type of calendar integration is the solution for this.

• Having a Historical Record
  The system I describe does not have a good historical log of what has been accomplished.

• How Full Should One Day Be?
  Should you be able to finish a to do list in a day? Or should there be so much on the list that it always roll over to the next day? I don’t know the answer, but currently I never finish everything planned for the day.

• Allowing Yourself To Be Successful
  Another conflict I have is allowing myself to be productive even if it isn’t in the way that I planned. Allowing the flow of energy and motivation carry me to complete tasks (tasks that need completing) that I wasn’t necessarily planning on doing at that time is something I am working towards.

• Getting Overwhelmed
  I get seriously overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer volume of tasks that I outline for myself.

• Prioritization
  I see effective prioritization as my current largest issue. Understanding internal versus external sources of prioritization was a strong breakthrough, but when it comes to daily decisions, weighing one item against the next is not always clear cut. I don’t have any easily quantifiable metrics I can just use to prioritize.

Final Thoughts

Best of luck. You got this.

• Writing Codifies Thinking
  Writing codifies thinking; getting ideas out of your head and onto the ‘page’ forces you to solidify them into coherent words and structure. It allows you to examine your thoughts clearly and work to refine them.

• Getting Shit Done
  The highest value will always be placed on the ability to get things done. Use these ideas as a tool for that. Remember, you can have the most beautiful and organized to do list on the planet, but that isn’t the goal, getting things on the list done is.

• Be Careful
  Don’t reduce fun to a list. Don’t prevent spontaneity.

• Critical Self Examination
  All ideas, processes, and thoughts on ourselves are imperfect. If you accept them all just the way they are, then you will be at a standstill. Critically examine what you think and do and make sure that aligns with what you want from yourself. The journey is the destination.