To List Or Not To List

Today’s question is about the validity of the humble to-do list. Or perhaps you think of it as the vaunted to-do list. It feels like a thousand years ago I heard a story about Charles M. Schwab, the President of Bethlehem Steel (not to be confused with Charles R. Schwab, the founder of the eponymous investing stock brokerage and financial services company).

Steel-Schwab, let’s call him, was obsessed with efficiency, and in 1918, he hired Ivy Lee, an efficiency expert, to advise him on how he could get more done. Lee’s advice, which later became known as the Ivy Lee Method, was the following:

• At the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks to accomplish the next day—no more than six.
• Rank these six tasks in order of their true importance.
• The next day, start with the first task and work on it until it is finished before moving on to the second task.
• Continue down the list in order. Any unfinished tasks move to the next day’s list.
• Repeat this process daily.

I read in the book The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes the “secret” method of billionaires. It was the same. Major a list with no more than six items. Later, Jay Papasan would write a book called The ONE Thing, and he would advise cutting the list to a single most important thing.

I can’t recall where I read it, but another method was to take a piece of paper (8.5x11 for Americans and Canadians, A4 if you are from the rest of the world), and fold it three times. You will end up with a sheet of paper that is about the size of a standard American Index Card (three inches by five inches, or A7 cards for all-yall in the rest of the world - ROW).

It is hard to fit more than six times on a piece of paper this size - but if you have really tiny print and you turn it portrait, you can pack a lot of information onto such a card.

But the real point is to focus. There are a couple of items here with Ivy Lee’s and Chet Holmes methods.

1. At the end of the day, make your list.
2. Decide what is most important.
3. Focus on one item at a time and work it to completion.

I saw Mr. Papasan speak at an EO Arizona event in Scottsdale. What I recall from the talk is that they limited the list to one thing because it takes mental energy and self-discipline to force yourself to focus on a prioritized list, and it turns out humans do not have these in an unlimited supply.

Therefore, his advice was to pick one thing and focus on that. The one most important thing. After that, have at it, but make sure you apply your precious, limited self-discipline doing what is most important.

So in that regard, Lee and Papasan were in alignment. Choose the night before - which is a form of Hemingway Bridge, then decide what matters most, focus on that first thing.

Note: What is a Hemingway Bridge? According to Tiago Forte, Ernest Hemingway wrapped up each writing session by writing a few sentences about what he intended to do next as he ended his writing session.

Making your list at the end of the day has the following advantage: your head is already filled with the context of working all day. If you will, your working memory is loaded with context. You know what you wanted to get done when you ran out of time. You will lose this felt sense of what is important once your brain moves onto other tasks, like dinner, socializing, and resting for the evening. So capturing the intent while you have it all fresh in your memory is most effective.

But Does It Work?

Look, lists of things to do have been around forever. Human brains are great at storing narratives, stories, but not facts and arbitrary lists of things. Every home has some kind of recipe book, but I have never been in a home that had one book, let alone a shelf or cupboard full of story summaries. We remember stories. But steps, procedures, ingredients, we need mnemonic aids.

But the prioritized list? Well, there are two problems I have run into.

1. Everything is important to someone. Very few people put things on a to-do list that does not need to get done (but it does happen).
2. We don’t always control our lists. Priorities (and plans) can change in an instant.

In my next post, I will share the task management and list tips that have been most useful to me.