Back when I was working on my bachelor’s degree in software engineering I was taking 4 - 5 classes (12 - 15 credit hours) per semester. Most semesters this was easily handled as I would pick a balance of classes that needed a lot of attention and some that did not. However, there were some semesters where I did not have much of a choice other than to pick all or nearly all classes that required a lot of work and those semesters were the most stressful and overwhelming.
I found it difficult to balance out the time necessary for each class because it was so easy to get stuck on a project or test to study for and all of a sudden all of the other coursework for other classes greatly suffered. This would happen time and time again and it would cause me a lot of stress and a lot of stomach aches. My wife would remind me each time this happened to write down everything that needs to get done and when in a checklist/to-do list form and then do it. This was an activity that was always successful in helping manage my time and stress.
I believe the parts that stressed me out the most at these times is that I would have too much to get done. In fact, it was not too much but my brain would keep cycling through every task that needed to be done in an effort to remind me and not let me forget. The problem here was that I was constantly thinking of everything that needed to be done instead of actually doing the stuff that needed to be done.
So, with writing all of the tasks down on a to-do list, I found that my mind was significantly more clear and able to better focus on completing tasks. I was able to offload that work that my mind was having to do and that made quite a difference in how I worked and how much I was able to get done.
For the rest of my undergraduate work I would continue making to-do lists, but only when I was stressed and/or overwhelmed. When I got to be stressed and overwhelmed, the to-do lists helped but it wasn’t until after college that I really started to make progress and be more efficient with how I use to-do lists.
It was a little less than a year after I graduated with my undergrad and I had been working in a software development role that I started using a daily to-do list. Each day before starting work on anything I would write down all of the tasks that I wanted to accomplish for that day. Of course, other things came up throughout the day and those would get added and priorities would change. But, the main purpose for the list stayed the same and it helped me from becoming overwhelmed as easily because my mind was free from having to juggle all of the needed tasks.
After a year of doing the daily task lists I started making my task lists not just daily task lists, but context based with assigned dates. It was around this time that I read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. While I do not currently follow all of the practices that Allen suggests in his book, I have taken on my own flavor of GTD that works well for me.
Since then, I have continued multiple checklists for different contexts. A list for home, school, work, anywhere, errands, waiting for, someday/maybe, and so on. This made it so that I could continuously add tasks and keep a backlog whenever I needed it. It is easy to have tasks for work that do not need to be done today, but something that I want to do next week and because it is written down, I will not forget it and I do not have to stress about remembering it.
Every so often I try something new with how I work my task lists and sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. But regardless of what works and what does not the core principle is there which helps me in my work wherever I am and whatever I am doing. Especially lately I feel that I rarely have to spend any time deciding what to do and I can dedicate more time to getting things done.
If you haven’t tried offloading your to-do list from your brain to paper, I would highly recommend giving it a try. I could go on and on about different little details and optimizations for GTD, but it really does not have to be all that complicated. Avoid convoluted setups and start simple.
See you around,
Sam