To-do or not to-do: Why do you need to draw up lists of affairs
How to correctly compose lists of working tasks for the day and why this can help us cope with the load?
Surely you are familiar with the situation when there are so many working tasks that you can’t even keep them all in memory. You are in a panic, how can everything be in time, get out of your strength day after day, and then you suddenly wake up at night and remember that you completely forgot about another report, my mother -in -law’s birthday or a trip with your child to the theater. Relatives are offended, the authorities reproach you with non -launchedness, and you sadly understand that in your life there is no room left even for simple joys.
The list of cases may come to the rescue. Surprisingly, many note that once having recorded all the things that they are currently littered, they feel that the tension begins to decrease. Why is this happening? Why, not advanced, in fact, in any of their affairs, people nevertheless feel relieved?
According to David Allen, a specialist in personal and organizational productivity, the cause of stress is not only the presence of a large amount of affairs, but also the efforts that we spend on holding them in our memory. The list of cases in these cases appears to be a kind of external hard drive: it is engaged in storing information, freeing your brain so that it can calmly focus on what it does best – on a direct solution of problems.
A little theory
In 1956, the psychologist George Miller tried to answer the question of how many units of information a person can hold in his mind at the same time, resulting in the emergence of a work called “Magic number 7 ± 2”*. Subsequent studies have confirmed the basic idea: our consciousness can perceive and hold at one point in time a very limited amount of information. Therefore, it is not surprising that sometimes we forget about the presence of certain assignments – we are physically not able to operate on more than nine (at the best case) tasks at the same time. Add to this the amount of information that we receive every second through our senses: smells, images and colors, sounds. For all these seemingly trifles, our consciousness is also forced to be distracted. Nevertheless, we still try to have time everywhere and remember everything, as a result of which we get stress and be upset: constantly distracting from one task with thoughts about another, we do not succeed in either there or there. Lists will help out. “Your mind will not work until you write reminders for yourself and put them in the place that will be in sight,” Allen explains.
What to do
1. Make a notebook or use the appropriate application on your phone, highlight yourself at least half an hour and make a list of all the things that you have on the agenda.
2. Do not subject yourself to censorship and do not limit yourself to only working matters: include everything in the list, starting from unfulfilled professional tasks to household chores and instructions that are not yet outlined by aspirations and life goals.
3. Take the habit of adding items to your list as soon as they come to your mind.
4. Experience shows that in order to better remember what you meant on your list, for each item you should use at least one verb. For example, if you just write a “conference”, you will have to remember for a long time what exactly you meant. If you write: “Call Maria, clarify the details of the conference,” you will thereby create something specific, not requiring additional guesses that allows you to immediately take the phone and begin to execute this item without wasting time for nothing.
5. Give up every day to view the list. For example, you can do this in the morning during breakfast, this will help you clarify the schedule for the day. And remember that the goal is not to immediately fulfill all the points from the list, but to streamline your thoughts and unload your consciousness.
6. If the compilation of lists is already a familiar business for you, make up every day from the general list of a new one, including only the most urgent tasks.
If you perform these simple actions day
after day, you will soon notice how they will turn into your habits and be fixed at a subconscious level. And then you will no longer need to worry about the emergency at work or unexpectedly falling up affairs and it will be possible to focus on solving individual points, everything else will make your habits.
* The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Toome Limits on Our Capacy for Processing Information, Psychological Review, 1956.
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