How To End The Never-Ending To-Do Lists

One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is the knowledge you’ve completed your tasks for the day. If you can look at your To-Do list and do a “check check check” on all the boxes, someone’s going to have a good night’s sleep filled with dreams of puppies and ice cream. Or whatever. Point being, it is simply glorious to sit back, pop your feet up, and say to yourself with utter contentment, “ahhh…. finished.” 

What if you need help completing the tasks on your to do list? What if, no matter how much you try, you just can’t seem to tick those boxes?

All The Apps

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that there are so, so many options available to you. Some of them being: 

1.Trello

2. Todoist 

3. Gmail Tasks 

4. Microsoft To Do  

5. Remember The Milk 

6. OmniFocus 

7. Any.do 

8. Evernote’s Tasks 

There is an ocean of apps and services to aid you in your noble quest to complete what needs to be done. 

The bad news is that they may not be helping all that much. The question is, why? Why can’t we seem to finish those to-do lists? Are we broken and lazy? Are we prioritizing tasks in a disorganized manner? And why, despite all these helpful options available to us, do we fail to complete our tasks?

The Doctor Is In

Worry not, because the doctor is here to ease your concerns. Dr. Bluma Zeigarnik, to be specific. Dr. Zeigarnik, a Soviet scientist, conducted a study nearly one hundred years ago in 1927 on this very topic. What she discovered was that when we do not finish a task, we have a tendency to obsess over it. This is known today as “the Zeignarik effect,” and while it doesn’t perfectly answer this phenomenon, it does begin to offer an explanation. Two psychologists later confirmed this in 2011. 

What’s The Solution?

Why don’t these virtual to-do lists seem to help? The simple answer is that they don’t go far enough. It takes more to complete a task than simply writing it down. To truly and effectively complete the tasks you just need to do one simple thing: Plan. 

Plan, plan, plan. Be a dork about it. Come up with a strategy for completing your tasks in an efficient manner. Which doesn’t mean starting with the difficult and ending with the easy, nor the other way around. You could switch between simple and hard. It could even take hours to properly plan a method of execution. What you’ll find is that, with a solid plan, you’re going to become the master of to-do lists. 

It truly doesn’t matter how you plan. Everyone has their own organizing style and strategies.

Here are a few tips to give you an idea of what super organized people do. 

It’s just not enough to make a to-do list and then go for it. You have to plan and strategize every step of the way. You manage to do this, and you’ll be crushing those lists like some kind of Crushinator.