2023-01-25 Industrial Strength Todo Lists (Part 1)

Basic todo lists are cool, but often don’t make the cut.

They are, well, too simple and can get messy easily. Deadlines, imposed requirements, blocking interdependences, vast scope differences (say, “reply to Bob” and “organize team offsite” hanging out together). All of this means they quickly become useless at best, and a complicated side job to keep them straight at worse.

Here’s a way to fix that. I learned this from a really great technical program manager I worked with, and added some tweaks.

This will take a bit to explain, so I’ll split it: today we build our list, tomorrow we complete with usage and updating.

Let’s go.

First: Collect all the things
The first step, just like with todo lists, is to collect all your items.

You should do a brain dump: literally anything relevant goes. Write it down instead of keeping in in your mind. Move stuff you’re keeping in your inbox, on little paper scraps, on some note app on your phone. You can either put all things specific to a context (say, “all work items”, or “all personal items”, or “all my personal goals”) in a separate list, or throw everything together. I tend to oscillate between the two.

Dump everything out of your head and onto paper (or a text file, in my case)

Second: Delete all the crap
If you actually wrote everything on your mind down, more than half of the items are probably crap.

We all have half thought ideas and things we might want to do one day, “nice to haves”, and just plain excuses. Scan your list and delete any crap you can find. If you don’t know if you’ll ever do it, just delete it. If it’s not something you think is actually necessary but “might be nice if you get to it”, kill it mercilessly.

Life’s too short to hold on to useless tasks.

Third: Make projects and tasks
Here’s the secret: there are only three types of todos: tasks, projects, and processes.

• A task is a thing you can do in one go. It’s the base block of your list. If it is completely clear and will take no more than one hour and a single activity to do, that’s a task.
• A project has two properties: 1) It is more than one task, and 2) It can be completed and be done. That’s. It. Fill a form and post it to the bank? That’s a project. Organize your wedding? Also a project. At least two tasks, and finished at some point.
• A process is a recurring item. Having team meeting is a process. So is brushing your teeth. Think like, a project, but can’t ever be done. You don’t manage processes here.

So, next step is go through your list and normalize it into sublists.

Each item should end up in one of three states:

1. It’s actually a project. In this case, promote it to a section title on your list, and list actual tasks for the project. Here’s an important thing: you might not know (in fact you almost certainly won’t) all the tasks needed to complete the project. That’s ok. Write down all the things you already know you’ll have to do, and all the tasks you’ll need to perform to find out what else needs to happen.
2. It’s a task that belongs to a project, or clusters with other tasks to form a project. Great! Make the appropriate project and move all the relevant tasks under it. This will happen more than you think: humans are great at clustering and finding sense and structure in things. Go with it, but keep it sensible.
3. It’s a ‘free’ task: just a single thing to be done, no project. This is the type of stuff that swims randomly between your ears until you capture it. If once a task is complete there’s nothing else to do to “be done”, then it’s not a project by our definition. Couple of options: either treat them as “degenerate” projects of one task, or (what I do) have a “Required minutiae” section in your list, at the same level of projects.

Fourth: Prioritize
Time to put some order in your list. Literally.

You have this nice list of projects and their tasks. What you need to do now is prioritize it. Here’s the deal: you prioritize the projects, not the tasks.

So, use a number or a letter to mark each project (1 to 5, or A to F or whatever works for you), and then sort the projects by priority.

There. Now you have a nice and well organized super-todo-list of projects and their tasks. Doesn’t it feel better already?