And that’s where project-based to-do lists don’t work. They add more work than is necessary, slow down getting the work done, duplicates your work and dilutes your focus. It’s particularly bad if you adhere to the belief anything involving more than one step is a project. With that approach, you end up with a huge list of projects that require regular reviewing and trying to decide where a task goes becomes time-consuming. You end up wasting so much time reviewing and processing, the part where you do the work becomes secondary to your project task list management.
To me, all this additional processing and reviewing just added a lot of time to the admin side and did very little to give me more doing time. But, like so many other people I completely bought into the idea that everything had to be organised by project and those projects needed to be reviewed regularly. And given the definition of a project is anything involving two or more tasks, that can lead to hours and hours spent just reviewing and processing with no time spent doing the work! No wonder we feel stressed out and overwhelmed. We are constantly being told to review and look at our work to do and those lists are getting longer and longer and the time spent doing the work is getting shorter and shorter.
Today, to see how my work is progressing all I need do is look at the project’s file folder. That tells me — in real-time — exactly where a project is. Trying to manage that in a to-do list manager often leads to confusion because if you are not checking everything off when you are doing it (requiring more time away from doing your work) you end up with a false picture of how a project is progressing. The documents I am writing, the presentation files I am creating; those files give me the real picture. All I need my to-do list manager to do is tell me what to work on today.