To Do Lists are So Hot Right Now

General Theory

Sometimes I feel like there are an infinite number of tasks that I must complete. By creating a list, I can shrink the infinite into a manageable set of things to do. They help me stay focused, and they help me prioritize. Whenever I start day dreaming about lofty goals, or fall down a rabbit hole of "what-if's," I refer back to my list. If my momentary preoccupation isn't on the list, I ask myself: should it be on there? If so, put it on there. If not, go back to what is on the list. 

A nice ancillary benefit of lists is that I can cross things off as I complete tasks. I believe this simple act can inspire positivity and help build momentum towards finishing other tasks on the list. That's why I always include fairly simple tasks on my list: small wins count! Another benefit is that lists help break seemingly unachievable goals into manageable smaller tasks.

How I Did (Do) It

A few months back, a friend and I began meeting frequently to discuss the latest happenings in machine learning in an effort to land a data science gig. We felt supremely overwhelmed with the amount of material we felt we should learn (who wouldn't be with terms like stochastic gradient descent or feedforward neural network!). Even after signing up for an online course that was organized in weekly sections, we still felt there was a mountain of stuff to cover. 

Enter lists. I recalled a Freaknomics podcast on productivity I listened to in March. The guest, Charles Duhigg, talked about SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and based on a timeline. I didn't exactly replicate his list methodology (in fact, I think I some ways I'm doing the opposite), but there were some important takeaways for me.

Rather than putting "learn machine learning algorithms" on my mental to-do list, I began writing down things like "create Kmeans algorithm from scratch in R." Being more specific naturally created timelines for me; it would be unrealistic or unachievable to do the innumerable tasks that would make up a less defined goal.

Successes and Failures

I started out with daily lists. I wasted a lot of paper. Not only that, I wasn't crossing many things off! This process actually discouraged me, as I felt like I wasn't getting anything done. I moved to a weekly list, which immediately became more satisfying. Here's the other thing with weekly lists: if I keep having to push a task to the following week, I start to get the sense that maybe this task isn't a priority after all. Done. Gone.

From the Pros

Here's a link to the aforementioned podcast, and a short quote from the transcript.

[T]he question then becomes how do you remind yourself of the bigger task? And so what psychologists recommend is that on your to-do list you have two types of goals. At the top of the page you write a stretch goal. And the stretch goal should be that big ambition. And then underneath that, you should write something that makes that stretch goal tangible and into a plan. And one of the systems for doing this is this thing called SMART goals, right?