The to-do list hacks I can't live without

Seriously. Don't make me try to live without them.

I’ve always been pretty big on keeping things organized.

I have vivid memories of setting (literal) weeks aside at the end of every summer to get my supplies in order for a new school year. I found an arguably sick satisfaction in evolving my systems from one year or semester to the next, pivoting between three-ring binders and notebooks, combining materials for different classes to make things easier to manage, or shopping for a planner to swap out for the one issued by the school. I developed obsessive systems around taking notes, tracking assignments, keeping up with readings… I think you get the idea. These habits followed me to college, and then to my first jobs at a book publisher in New York.

I’ll be honest: I took it too far sometimes, especially when I was a teenager. My family members still tease me about the absurd number of hours I spent complying with the over-the-top systems that I designed for myself. While I know that these tendencies helped me cultivate many of the working and time management habits that have served me well as an adult, I can see with the benefit of hindsight that I didn’t always need to make it so complicated or take it so seriously.

Still, I was especially grateful for my organizational habits when I left my publishing job and started freelancing and working for myself at the end of 2016.

The hardest part of making that job transition wasn’t so much about the work itself. It was about the habits and systems I needed to establish—and stick to—in order to make the work happen… and not just for a day or a week or a month, but on a continuing basis.

To this day, when people ask for my advice about freelancing or self-employment, I speak to personality traits and tendencies more than just about anything else.

I love nerding out about the nitty-gritty details of work and productivity, and I’m happy to do that in this space if/when it’s of interest to you. But if there’s one thing I really swear by, it’s a to-do list—and a to-do list managed in a very specific way.

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Currently Reading: American Mermaid by Julia Langbein

The cover of this book drew me in immediately when I stumbled on it at a bookstore over the summer. I hadn’t heard of American Mermaid and I didn’t know anything about it, but I just had to read it. To this day, it’s one of my favorite covers of the year! Inside that beautiful package is something really creative, inventive, and different. It’s a cool take on what it means to be a creator and what happens when your ideas take on a life of their own. Very weird, but very cool and delightful.

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As far as I can tell, there’s a place for to-do lists in pretty much everyone’s life, and I’ve heard many people talk about the efforts they’ve made to make them a useful, meaningful staple of their routines. I’ve also heard many people talk about how those efforts have, at times, proven less than successful.

With that in mind, I have some specific hacks that I hope will help you lean on (and—dare I say—love) your to-do lists as much as I do…

(Rest assured that I realize how this kind of subject matter can lean in a tedious direction. As I said, I love to nerd out about it—and I truly think these tips can be helpful.)

• Make your list for every day. Making my list for the next day is usually the very last thing I do before I get ready for bed. It’s a non-negotiable part of my routine. While I keep track of what has to happen each day of the week in my planner (more on that later!), I sit down and make that dedicated list separate from those planner pages every night (excluding the weekends).

• Write your list the night before. Before I started making my to-do lists the night before, I found that my mornings would get off to a weird, often delayed start. I would have to sit down at my computer and try to get things prioritized and organized before I could actually start the day… and that often led to distractions and wasted time. Writing my list the night before means that I can jump right into my morning! It also means I’m less likely to get distracted by less-than-urgent things that other people need me to do since I’ve already made a plan for myself. Plus, if you’re someone who tends to lose sleep stressing about what has to get done the next day, you can think of this kind of proactive planning as a sort of brain dump that gets all of the tasks out of your head and onto the page.

• Look at the week, too. My focus in this post is, obviously, on daily to-do lists, but I’m a big believer in using a planner to give yourself a sense of the full week, too. I’ve been using the Passion Planner (not an ad—I wish they would partner with me!) for years now, and one of the things I like most about it is the space it offers for jotting things down every single day. Whether you opt for the Passion Planner, another paper planner, or something more digital, I would recommend finding a system that allows you to easily make notes about things later in the week—or month—as they come up. From there, it’s easier to transfer your tasks to your daily to-do list, since the past version of you will have already done a lot of the work.

• Include time for dealing with your emails on your to-do list. This sounds super geeky (geekier, even, than the rest of this post), but I always include a line for “email maintenance” on my daily to-do lists. While I don’t pretend that this is the one and only time I go through emails, I do try to restrict a lot of that kind of work to that period. Knowing that I’m a morning person, I always plan for my inbox time within the first hour or so of waking up. When messages come in later in the day, I tend to be a less effective communicator, and since I know I have time set aside for emails first thing the next morning, I rarely find myself getting distracted by incoming notes. If something is urgent, I’ll address it. Otherwise, I let it wait until the next day!