To Do Lists: why they don’t work

Reading over my To Do list, I just felt daunted. Even prioritising the items felt a bit overwhelming, because it seemed like everything was important!

Then I remembered that a To Do list can very easily become a form of poor behaviour – and here I was demonstrating it to myself! So I immediately changed the title of the list to ‘To Be Done’.

This had a pretty big effect right away, because To Be Done doesn’t mean that I have to do it, so the load I was imagining was all down to me was immediately halved.

But then I remembered something I’d done a few years ago when Philip and I were helping my parents renovate their old farmhouse in France. There were so many jobs to be done, a never-ending list of them, that we stopped making even a To Be Done list. Instead, at the end of each day, over a glass of wine and a lovely meal outside under the vine, each one of us said what task we had completed that day. I listed them all down, and then read out everything that had been achieved. The effect was miraculous! We all felt hugely proud of what we’d managed to do, with even the smallest things counting, and satisfaction of a good day’s work enabled us to enjoy our meal even more than usual.

I’ve just started this method up again, and it really works to make me feel good, so make your What We Achieved list and see how it feels to you!

Jane