It’s easy to lean on technology to organize your to do list. You can dump every item, urgent, or otherwise, into an organized, tagged and perfectly prioritized digital list. You’ll never forget again to take check a report, take out the garbage, or change your contact lenses. But because you can put anything and everything on your digital to do list, it quickly becomes unmanageable. And when you invariably fail to check off the 20 things you optimistically meant to do today, the guilt (and overdue tasks) starts to pile up.
To be fair – digital lists have their place – I think they’re great for keeping track of firm deadlines in the future, and building a pool of “someday” projects to tackle later. But for building your daily to do list, I don’t think anything beats paper. By manually writing your list from scratch each day forces you to consciously consider what really needs to get done today, not just the mountain of automated reminder tasks you set three months ago.
Form factor matters too. I picked up the idea from Ryan Holiday (who apparently got the idea from Tim Ferriss) to keep lists on a single page of a small pocket notebook (or in his case, an index card). It turns out that this size is perfect for keeping your day’s workload realistic. You can’t fit much on a sheet this size – maybe 4-6 big items. It turns out that’s probably all you’ve got time for in a day anyway.