They are comforting, like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter afternoon. They make you feel accomplished, like getting the right answer to a difficult math problem. They make you feel as if you’re going somewhere, like Siri giving you directions when you’re in a strange neighborhood. To-do lists…They don’t work.
At some time in your life as a child, young adult or student somebody thought it would be a good idea to teach you to use “to-do lists” as a tool for greater productivity. I have no doubt that individual was well-intentioned, but they were, unfortunately, misinformed when they recommended such a device as the most effective weapon for your productivity arsenal.
Before we begin to explore why that might be, we should first ask ourselves, “What does a quality efficiency hack even look like? What does it do for me?”
A good tool will save you time. Time is your most valuable asset and any system worth its salt will allow you to conserve it. This requires specificity and exactness when it comes to defining tasks and accomplishing them efficiently. On top of that, a good tool will never over-promise nor under-deliver. That is, you will never feel disappointed at the end of your day, having decided in advance to accomplish ten things and then only truly finishing three of them. A spinoff of this second requirement is that your tool will allow you to get more done than you otherwise would have. While it won’t promise you a phone book of checked-off to-do boxes, a good system will consistently deliver you what you ask of it.
Evaluating your daily “to-do’s” in light of these new criteria, a simple list of tasks clearly falls short of the ideal. It will not save you time. While helpful for providing clarity, knowing simply what needs to get done is not going to help you do it any more effectively. Unless you’re constantly flopping about like a severed octopus tentacle with no inkling of what to do, simply writing down all of your goals is not going to help you get them done any more quickly. Most to-do lists are neither specific nor exact. It is simply not the nature of a to-do list to break down your tasks into actionable elements, and taking the time to do so on your index card or in daily planner always seems like more of a hassle than a help.
Running down the list of shortcomings, this method almost always gives you hope at dawn and then dashes it at sundown. An unofficial study by the project-tracking software provider iDoneThis found that 41 percent of items written down on a to-do list are never completed. The thing is, this statistic actually makes sense. Because lists do not take time into account, you could be unintentionally giving yourself five hours-worth of actions when your schedule only permits you three hours. This makes your results inconsistent and demoralizing in accordance with the Zeigarnik effect, a psychological phenomenon that states that our minds focus more on incomplete tasks than on ones we have actually accomplished. To-do lists, in the end, are going to stress you out more often than they are going to help you get everything done.
So, if I’m done deriding our most well-known productivity tool, do I have something better for us to use? I do, in fact, though I can’t take credit for the system. The new method I propose is called “time-blocking,” and I first encountered it in the productivity manual “Deep Work,” by Cal Newport, an associate professor at Georgetown University. Time-blocking requires you to take a blank sheet of lined paper, devote two lines from top to bottom to each hour of the day and then divide that list into blocks labeled for specific to-do’s. Each line represents one half-hour of your time, and scheduling your day in this manner has significant advantages over making a simple catalog of tasks to be accomplished.
Time blocking requires the specificity and exactness that will allow you to accomplish the first, and most important, goal of a well-forged productivity weapon—saving time. Unlike a to-do item, such as “finish homework”, time blocking makes it necessary for you to employ much more specific goals with far more precise time constraints, like “French: 30 minutes, CompSci lab: 60 minutes, philosophy: 30 minutes.” While it takes practice to get good at estimating the time we need to complete each task (we humans generally fall prey to the planning fallacy, a psychological situation whereby we chronically underestimate the time it will take us to complete various assignments) the benefits are massive and measurable.
The specificity necessary for time blocking also severely limits or negates the issue of over-promising yourself when it comes to daily productivity. It forces you to be pragmatic and only schedule work you know you can complete. In doing so, it mitigates the Zeigarnik effect and reduces your stress. Instead of feeling harried every evening as you struggle to complete a list of to-do’s a mile long you’ll instead experience the confidence of knowing that you have everything under control.
They say that “Practice makes perfect,” but I would prefer to say, “Practice is power.” You can only achieve the results of any productivity system if you make the commitment to learn and implement it on a consistent basis. The power of your practice will fuel your accomplishment and free you from the burden of undue anxiety. Knowing what you need to do and knowing that you will get it done are two very different things, but when experienced together the sensation is undeniably splendid.
Jack Dolinar is a Trinity sophomore. His column, “more percent efficient,” runs on alternate Fridays.
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Jack Dolinar is a Trinity junior. His column runs on alternate Mondays.