One of the most important roles our smartphones play in our lives these days is as productivity tools. However, they are often quickly pushed over the edge from productivity to over-organisation and most people find themselves organising their work on their phone rather than actually doing the work.

All this, of course, is assuming you have moved your daily organisation from paper to your gadgets — and saved trees in the process. If you have not, you probably should think of doing it because it has several advantages, not the least of which is speed, flexibility, access and ease of use. And those lovely trees again. I have found that the most common reason why people give up on technology is that they are unable to effectively manage it and the management itself becomes a chore, which defeats the purpose. But it does not have to be that way, and if you do it right, you might even enjoy it.

It all comes down to apps

Let us, for the purpose of this article, constrain ourselves to our mobile phones and see how best we can use it to organise our to-do lists. We all have them — my first list was made when I was in grade three with Post-It notes (mostly because I was fascinated with them), and a year later I had a small pocket book for things like this. The habit has stuck and I still carry a pocket book with me everywhere I go, although I use it for different reasons now. The work of maintaining my tasks list has been outsourced to my iPhone.

There are several apps you can choose from: iPhones come with a handy Reminders app bundled, some Android phones have such apps too. I do not use the Reminders app because it does not provide an overview of all my lists, so my app of choice is Wunderlist (available for free on iOS and Android and Windows). There are other alternatives too: a few years ago I was using Any.Do, which is also an excellent application, but I came to prefer Wunderlist’s look and feel. Both apps have free and paid plans and for my usage and style — and my approach to organising my to-do lists, the free versions suffice.

The trick here is to pick whatever app feels most natural to use, because the more forced its actions feel, the more likely it is that you will find yourself spending time organising and not working.

categories, times and priorities

At the outset, much like anything else, it helps to dedicate some time to set up your list (or app, if you will). This might take five minutes or fifteen, but is probably the longest time you will be spending on your to-do app. Once you have it set up, you should almost never find yourself spending more than a ten-second period in the app.

The basic question almost everyone faces is how best to organise task lists so they are effective. I have, myself, experimented with three alternatives: by category, by time and by priority. The issue with organising by category is that it looks extremely well-organised and looks great, but ultimately has absolutely no practical significance. If the idea of having a to-do list is to take the burden off your memory and focus on the tasks at hand, categoric organisation is of little help because you still end up wading through all categories to see what tasks you still have left to do.

Organising by time is great until you realise some tasks do not have a reminder associated with them, or a definite due date. And yet you can rank them by priority. Ranking by priority, as I see it, has only one problem: your list can become never-ending before you realise it, however this is easily rectified.

Image courtesy iDownloadblog

Getting things done

David Allen’s famous GTD method is cited by many as downright the best way to organise and handle tasks — and finish them on time. I am not entirely familiar with GTD myself except for what I have gathered from my general reading, yet, the idea behind GTD is easy to follow and, as many will concur, it is best used as a foundation to build your own system to boost your productivity.

For the sake of example, I will be using Wunderlist, because that is the app I use. However, whatever I outline can be extended to most other applications in one way or another, and certainly at least by analogy.

Start with an Inbox. The idea of this is to help you get a task or reminder out of your head and into your to-do app. In other words, this will be your default category or storage where you drop your thoughts in a few seconds and your aim is to make sure you empty your inbox whenever you find time, by moving tasks to their respective proper categories. Wunderlist provides an inbox by default, so you have nothing to worry.

From this point on, all your notes will fall into two categories: lists and actionable items. Actionable items are things you have to do, whether by a deadline or not; lists are simply lists for reference, such as grocery lists, project supplies, books to buy, films to watch etc. You can freely make as many lists as you like; these fall outside the scope of our discussion today and they, in any case, play no part in helping you get things done. What we are interested in are the actionable items.

My approach towards to-do lists

You can safely categorise them according to Dave Allen’s GTD method (roughly) as projects, next actions, waiting and someday. If you recall my inbox zero technique, which I had outlined a few months earlier, you will realise I advocate the use of a similar waiting folder to keep e-mails aside for later response. The idea behind the method I outline here is similar, except my own organisation is as follows¹:

1. Priorities
2. To-do
3. Recurring
4. Long term

Priorities are items which, naturally, must be done on priority. They may have a nearing deadline or they may just be things important enough to divert a lot of time and attention to. Things on this list are left undone only if I have a strong reason or preoccupation.

To-do is a catalog of all my other tasks. These may also have due dates but are relatively less important or less time-consuming or simply tasks I can afford to complete at leisure, but ones which must be completed anyway.

Recurring tests are daily, weekly, monthly or annual (or in any other frequency) repeating tasks. From regular appointments with the doctor to quarterly spring cleaning, everything ought to go on this list so you do not have to remember them and can rest assured that you will be reminded on time.

Long term tasks are generally those without deadlines which I want to complete, but can afford to do so at my own time. They take low priority and usually keep me occupied during my spare time. These are not hobbies, but more targeted tasks which some prefer to call personal projects.

A technological twist

The entire idea behind maintaining a to-do list is that you can focus on other tasks and not spend your energy remembering — and risk forgetting — things you have to do. The practice has been around since decades and is nothing new, except we have moved from paper to screen. This makes sure our lists are always with us — since our phones always are — and we have no excuse not to put something down. We can update them, synchronise them across devices and even share tasks with others in a more systematic manner.

In addition, unlike paper, working with devices can make things more connected. Think of a task as routine as “Call X at 18:00 today” which involves manually calling X versus simply clicking on a list entry that automatically links to your contacts and calls said person. Simple things like this are what make digital task lists a cleverer option.

The principle of factor sparsity: 80% of your effort must be targeted towards the top 20% of your tasks by priority.

One can also think of adding hashtags (which most apps, like Wunderlist, allow). This groups tasks over time for whatever convenience that affords you. In my own case, for example, instead of making a new list for my research-oriented tasks, I simply tag them as convenient. Sorting by hashtags will then quickly bring together all my research tasks; this ensures I can pool them without cluttering the app with uncountable numbers of lists. This is an easy trap to fall into: try not to create too many lists because, if you follow the four categories above, you should get two categorisations with hashtags — all tasks will certainly fall into one of the four categories, and hashtags will further (optionally) categorise them by activity.

The Pareto Principle

Try to keep your tasks small because the larger a task is, the more daunting it seems and the less likely it is that you do it. And make sure something, at least one or two things from your list, get done every day — this has a motivational factor to it besides ensuring that you get things done.

Lastly, I absolutely love the Pareto principle or the principle of factor sparsity. There are many ways this principle is stated across various contexts, especially in business and economics, but my favourite statement is this: 80% of your effort must be targeted towards the top 20% of your tasks by priority. In effect, if you have five things to accomplish today and one hour to do it in, cut off the bottom three, spend fifty minutes on the top task, and ten minutes on the second one. This, on the long run, works best in helping you get all your work done. Alongside this I also like to use the Pomodoro technique, something I have briefly addressed in an older article.

To-do lists are a good thing. Part of this is about embracing technology and — what I have found to be — the best way of going about keeping and crossing items off a to-do list, but at the end of the day it still is all about getting things done with a lot more ease and planning.

1. This is only for actionable items, lists are separate and I do not outline them here because there is no need for them. ↩

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