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It is, however, helpful to keep your ambitions manageable. You can just look back at either your weekly list, or your ongoing list, and choose another task. Of course that does not mean that you cannot do more, if you have time.
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Three to five is probably the optimum, because you are likely to be able to achieve that more often than not, but some people say aim for just one, and then anything more is a bonus. Some people suggest that your daily list should contain no more than three items. Keep your daily or weekly lists manageable If they turn out not to be important enough, then you can delete them. The things from the first list-if they are important enough-should eventually make it onto the second list. The second is a way of prioritising and focusing your attention, so that you do the things that matter most when you have most energy.
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It is helpful if you can read everything on it at once, so keeping it to one page of a notebook or on screen is good. The first is a reminder of everything that needs doing at some stage. The list of tasks that you need to complete within a defined period (today, or this week, for example), which needs to remain short and manageable.īoth of these are To-Do lists, of a sort, but with different purposes.The ongoing list of ‘ things that need doing at some stage, when I have time’, which can get as long as you like or need and.If you are the kind of person that cannot remember things if they are not written down, then it is worth having two (or more) lists: You need to be able to tick items off your to-do list or you will start to worry again.įortunately, there are some simple ways in which you can write to-do lists that help you to achieve more. In other words, writing things down on a to-do list means that you stop worrying, and actually have time to prioritise and then complete your tasks.īut this handy brain-trick is also the reason why some to-do lists don’t work: they are too long, or too hard, to complete, and we start worrying again. That ought to mean that making a list of things to do makes us more worried, but it turns out that it actually tricks the brain into thinking that the task has been done. Our brains like things to be finished off and tidy, which means that we worry about things that need doing. To-Do lists work for one main reason: We tend to worry about things that we have left uncompleted
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