Why To Do Lists are awesome!

April 30, 2021 in Organize

I love To Do Lists! They help me stay organised, help me feel a sense of accomplishment as I check things off my list and give me a good outline of what I’ve done and what’s left to do. 

Sometimes though, a massive general to do list can be quite overwhelming and just add stress to your day. The key is to categorise, prioritise and break large items down into smaller steps. 

  • Printable Project To Do list for 1 project in Gold
  • Printable Daily To Do List in Teal - v2
  • Printable To do list with 4 categories per page in coral

Benefits of a To Do List

  • Clarity on what you need to get done
  • Helps you prioritise your time
  • Improves your productivity
  • Helps with motivation
  • Helps you to remember to make time for new habits
  • Makes you more organised 
  • You can’t accidentally forget about a task if you’ve put it on your to do list

Having a list of all your tasks will help you when you make a plan to get them all done. It can also help improve your memory – every time you look at the list it will reinforce the information. Having a memory aid isn’t bad either since we can’t keep an unlimited amount of information in our short term memory, if we haven’t written it down somewhere we’re bound to forget stuff. 

Tips for improving your productivity

  1. Write a general to do list.
    The General to do list is where you write down every single task that you can think of that needs doing. This can be tasks that needs to be done once a day, or just one-off things. For some people this massive list is enough and for others it’s simply a bit overwhelming.

    The good thing about it is that you get a good overview of all your tasks which makes it easier to prioritise and categorise them. It’s an easy way to improve your time management skills, and it can also help relieve stress and anxiety by getting all those to do items down on paper and out of your head.

  2. Categorise your list. I like putting all daily tasks on a Daily to do list, then put the rest of the tasks into categories in either a Categorised to do list or a Project to do list depending on the tasks.
  3. Prioritise. When transferring tasks to the new lists from the general one, I tend to put them in order of importance. This helps me get all the most important tasks done first before tackling the rest.

  4. Break it down. If you have a lot of big tasks on your list, consider breaking them down into smaller chunks. A massive task can seem quite overwhelming and is something you’re more likely to get demotivated by because it takes so long to accomplish. By breaking it down into smaller steps, you can check off items quicker and get a sense of accomplishment along the way. It also gives you an idea of how much longer you need to spend working on the project because you can compare the number of done tasks to the ones left to do. 

 

You can find all the To Do Lists that Neat & Tidy Design offers here. Want a bundle of 6 different To Do Lists, you can find our bestselling To Do List Kit here.

To Do List Kit of 6 documents - Printable PDF