Make a Magnificent To-Do List

Set Yourself Up for Success

Who doesn’t love to feel organized? Nobody. Everybody likes feeling organized.

“Oh my god Catherine everyone already knows how to make a to-do list!” Okay? So? You know how to make a to-do list and I know how to finish a Shelf Life in a reasonable amount of time and sometimes the way to do that is take a simple topic that everybody already knows about and expand on that, because then I don’t have to give a lot of background information. Everybody already knows about a to-do list so this is perfect.

I like to keep a complicated planner or journal with all kinds of stuff in it but I don’t have the motivation to do that all the time so about half my time is governed by planner and half is governed by a to-do list in lieu of planner. Usually one of the items on the to-do list is “find your planner” but that’s one of the items I never get around to but every six months (and the cycle continues).

Everybody can use a to-do list and writers are no exception so that’s how this article fits into the Shelf Life remit but this is one probably anybody can use. I’ve got a magnificent seven tips for making a magnificent to-do list below and if you don’t learn a single new trick to level up your to-do list, tell me in the comments and I’ll eat my hat. (Just kidding, I don’t own a hat, I have really cool hair.)

One Day at a Time

Whenever I start putting together a new to-do list, my impulse is to write down everything I can think of, like literally everything I have to do that I know about, from “take a shower” to “start next year’s holiday shopping.” Not all of those things are for today. That’s where a planner would be awfully handy right now, wouldn’t it? But if you’re just making a to-do list, you can’t put down everything and the kitchen sink or you’re going to have way too many things right in front of your face and you’ll get stressed so the first tip is to put only things you intend to do today on the actual to-do list section of your to-do list.

I said section because there are going to be three sections total on your paper (or whiteboard or Word doc or whatever you’re using): 

• Today

• This Week

• Later

You can set it up however you want, with three columns across or three rows down your paper or whatever. The idea is to only put things on today’s list that you can reasonably do today. Don’t put fifty things there. Most people can’t do fifty things in a day. You can be ambitious, but be realistic too.

Things that need to get done in the near future but not today can go in the “This Week” section, and things you know you need to do in the hazy future but aren’t urgent can be put under “Later” just so you don’t forget about them.

It’s fine for (most) items on a to-do list to migrate. You realize you’re not going to get something done today? No problem. Cross it off “Today” and move it to “This Week.” You can slot it into tomorrow when you’re making up tomorrow’s to-do list. If something resolves itself and you no longer need to do it, you can remove it entirely. I use a strikethrough line to show something has been removed from the list entirely, and a strikethrough line with an arrow at the end to indicate something has migrated to a later time. 

Migrating does raise one issue, however, which is:

Immovable Items

Some things really just need to get done today and can’t migrate off to tomorrow or a later date. You probably know what these things are, I always do, but it helps me to make it really obvious which items on my to-do list are not allowed to migrate. It might be because they are time-sensitive or it might be because I have already migrated them a bunch of times and I need to put my foot down with myself. 

When I’m making up my to-do list, I will mark items immovable as necessary by drawing the prohibited icon next to them (🚫). Time-sensitive items get first dibs on immovable status and I really don’t want to have too many of these in one day—one or two at most is enough—so if my auto registration expires tomorrow and I need to renew it today that’s more likely to be my immovable items for the day than the thing that I’ve been putting off for two weeks and honestly could be put off some more.

Create a Few More Icons

“Immovable” is probably not the only icon you need. You don’t want to have so many that you need to be constantly referencing a key to remember which is which, but having a few can help you visualize your day at a glance. I take a few tricks from bullet journaling for this part, so a normal task gets a dot (and an immovable task gets the slashed circle), an event gets an exclamation point, I draw a little envelope if I need to mail something out or if I’m expecting a package, and I draw a dollar sign if I need to pay a bill, Venmo somebody, or purchase something.

By the way, I draw the icons like “immovable” and “event” out in the left-hand margin next to my to-do list so they’re all lined up neatly down the page.

Set Up Categories

This is the part where I get to use my wide assortment of pens. In anyone’s day, the things we need to get done probably fall under a handful of broad headings. Mine are things like “work” stuff, “routine” stuff that I have to do all or most days, “writing” stuff, and “chores.” 

A crucial part of a to-do list, for me, is that it’s not in any particular order. It might start out that way at the beginning of the day but I’m going to be adding stuff to it and migrating stuff off it all day so I can’t be precious about items being in order (if you’re working in an electronic document then you can). Instead of trying to organize my to-dos into categories by grouping them together, I group them by color instead. For instance, work stuff might be in blue pen, routine stuff in red pen, writing in purple pen, and chores in black pen. Highlighters would also work for this but they’ll make your to-do list look even more like a circus so use caution.

Start With a Gimme

Okay so now your organization system is set up with sections for “Today,” “This Week,” and “Later”; with icons to indicate types of items; and a color system to keep your categories straight. Now you get to start putting things on the list! This is the second-best part, the best part being crossing things off the list.

On that note, I always start the day’s to-do list with something really easy to accomplish. Even though I don’t do the items in order, having something really easy (or a few easy things) right at the top of the list lets me start crossing things off first thing in the morning. Crossing something off the list creates momentum to cross more things off the list and and more things get done.

A simple one is “Review Today’s To-Do List,” which works best if you put your list together the night before. When you sit down to consult your to-do list for the day, the first thing you have to do is review it anyway and see what’s on it and whether you need to add or remove anything, so why not make that the first item on the list? You’ll be crossing stuff of in minutes.

Build in Rewards

When I have things I want to do I don’t always put them on my to-do list because I know I won’t forget to—checking my notes—“play video games” or “take a nap.” But if there are things you’d like to do during your day, put those on the to-do list too, even if they’re not “must do” items or chores you need to remember. That way if you find yourself on the sofa playing Tiny Tina’s Wonderland when you should have been writing, you can recover by crossing “Play Video Games” off your to-do list and regaining some momentum.

Everyone’s work-to-reward ratio for optimal motivation is different, but if you have a sense of what yours is, try to build in enough pleasant or fun to-dos proportional to the chores and habits and work tasks and life tasks you have to do. Also let’s all try to normalize doing fun things and making time for self-care instead of beating the productivity drum 24 hours a day which is bad for everyone.

Keep an Overflow List

This is my favorite part of the to-do list methodology and what is hilarious is I picked this up from an article about “overlearning” but I misunderstood what overlearning meant, or possibly the article was using the word “overlearning” in a different way than I usually see it used, but anyway here’s what the overflow list is about.

As you go about every day, if you are anything like me, you are going to see and hear things that make you want to do them or learn more about them. For instance, let’s say I have my to-do list set up for the day and on my lunch break I’m scrolling through Twitter and I discover a giant repository of information (in this case it was Brecht de Poortere’s ranking of more than 900 magazines that accept fiction submissions). This discovery has the potential to sideline me for the rest of the day if I click that link on my lunch break. I’m going to be in that file for hours and maybe I don’t have hours to devote to that today, at least not without wrecking the rest of my plans.

That’s where the overflow list comes in. This can be a corner of your paper, a fourth column, a fourth row, or a Post-It note stuck to the paper (this method is actually great because you can re-stick the overflow list to a new page each day). The overflow list is where you write down things that catch your attention and that you want to do, or learn about, or read up on, or buy, or whatever, but that don’t fit into your day today. Put them on the overflow list to be worked into your to-do list when you have time.

The great thing about this method for those of us who get distracted easily is sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and use a lot of time on something and three days later you’ve already forgotten it existed and don’t care anymore, and that time is wasted. If you put it on the overflow list and then you lose interest later, you can always remove it from the overflow list and no time wasted. (This is why I put things in my Amazon cart and then let them sit there for a week before I check out—because often three days later I don’t even want the thing anymore.) 

My overflow list currently has a lot of software to learn and some ambitious technical projects that I don’t have time to do yet. Why not put them in the “Later” section of my to-do list? Because I’m not actually sure I want to devote time to them yet. Until I’m sure I want to do it and I’m ready to think about actually starting, I don’t move them off “Overflow” and into “Later.”

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