Why your lists are not working for you

I love lists…I use them all the time.  But if you are wondering why you are writing lists and still not getting everything done, it’s because no matter what you have been told before…a list is NOT a plan.

The “What” of the plan:

A good list will give you the “what” of the plan (come back for my upcoming article on “Writing a Good List” to help you make your lists more effective).  A list of what you need to achieve is a vital input to a successful plan.  But it doesn’t tell you any more than all you haven’t achieved yet.  And in fact, it can become disheartening to look at a list that gets longer and longer every day even when you are crossing things off.  And when you are disheartened, you are much more likely to avoid tackling items on the list or to give up on the list altogether.

I remember a job I worked at very early on in my career.  My job was varied and required me to interact with a lot of people, do a lot of different tasks and follow up on tasks with other people.  So, I bought a special “task list” notebook.  Each page was long enough to fit about 30 or 40 items.  So, on my first day of using my notebook, I filled nearly a full page with things I needed to do.  At the end of the first day I had marked off about 5.  So, the next day, even as I marked off items on my list (I like the crossing out method, it gives me a better feeling than ticking!), I was adding more.  By the end of day 2, I was on the second page (which in this notebook was on the back of the first page).  By day 4, I faced a huge list dilemma.  Should I keep flicking back and forth between the pages to see which items were still outstanding, or should I rewrite the previous page’s items onto a new list to make them easier to read.

The reason I had this dilemma was that I was trying to use my list as both a record of all the tasks I had to do and a plan to achieve them.  If I couldn’t see them all on the same page, I was finding it increasingly difficult to plan the day in my head and things were definitely getting lost in the shuffle.

So, while in my early days in that job my head was often melted with my task list notebook, it was in the same job that I was sent on my first ever planning course where I learned the basics of turning my list into a plan.