For a while, I was obsessed with productivity. I was a fan of all the popular personal productivity blogs. I liked seeing how people organized their days and got things done, and I liked trying new techniques to get more things done faster.
These days, I’m no longer like this. I don’t try to squeeze productivity out of every minute. However, I’m still a fan of to-do lists.
If there are things I need to do and there are a lot of them, I can’t think of a better way to make sure they all get done. I break up a project into parts, or I list out individual tasks, and once I have everything written, I don’t have to worry about remembering each thing.
But what to do first?
My struggle with to-do lists is choosing what to do first. This is especially true when there’s no clear sequence and when each thing has a relatively equal priority.
To avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis, I’ve settled on a method to tackle these to-do lists, and after trying it for a while, it’s been surprisingly effective.
The top-down approach
I simply start at the top of the to-do list and work my way down. I don’t skip around, I don’t spend time picking a task from the middle of the list, and I don’t move on to the next until the current thing is complete. Of course, I give a moment’s consideration whether the next thing even needs to be on the to-do list anymore. Since the list only has things I still want to accomplish, I save the time and mental energy of deciding what to do next.
One example from my daily life is email. As a software engineer and quite frankly a person living in the modern world, I rely on email a lot. It notifies me of things, it’s how my bills are delivered, and it’s how people communicate with me, just to name a few.
I don’t like using folders in email. Instead, I have a fairly flat system of organization. My inbox is for emails that need action from me, which might include just reading them. The archive is for emails I don’t need anymore in the present but might reference in the future. Both the inbox and the archive have all kinds of emails mixed together.
When I sit down to take care of them, I start from the most recent, and then I go to the second most recent, and so on. The key is to not spend time looking at everything I could open and cherry picking the ones that seem most interesting. That is what ends up taking time and mental energy.
An important thing to note is that with email—the same would be true for a to-do list—the method only works because each item has a relatively equal weight. With email, I try to keep it this way by unsubscribing from nearly all promotional emails.
Apart from not having to decide which thing to do next, there’s another benefit: getting into the flow as quickly as possible. The hardest part of doing something is often the first step, so by picking the first item and going with it, I get over the hurdle. When I have to stop and think about what to handle next from a list of tasks or emails, it takes a toll on my focus.
When faced with list of things to do, each of them having equal importance, the top-down approach has worked wonders for me.