Making Lists: The Simple Strategy of Productivity Gurus

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Finding an effective way to get organised and set ourselves up for productivity can be tricky. With the plethora of options available to us nowadays, the search itself can be intimidating.

Tips on how to organise our lives pervade the internet. We are bound to find something that appeals to us, whether it be a minimalist approach or a more complex system. Choosing the right organisational system could be more important than we imagine, especially if we want to unlock our full potential and become as productive as possible.

It might be better to create our own system. By doing so, we can give ourselves the best chance of achieving superior results. One of the best places to start when getting organised is by making lists. Making lists is a key and simple strategy that most productivity gurus use to power through their work and achieve their dreams.

Read on to discover how making lists can supercharge our own productivity and help us better organise our lives. Before we discover the surprising power of making lists, though, we’ll investigate the best way to start building habits that will enable us to create kick-ass organisational systems.

Let’s get into it.

Building Habits

To create an effective organisational system, it is necessary to form good habits that stick. The key is to start small. If you start small, you will be able to sustain the effort required to build healthy habits. Plus, if you miss a day while you are trying to build a new habit, it will be easier to get back on track.

The same rule should apply when we begin to create our own organization systems. That way, each of us can take small steps towards becoming our most productive selves. Remember, organizational systems should:

• Be built around our goals and projects. We shouldn’t try to create goals that just fit well within our system.
• Start with a small, simple system that we can revise and update as we progress.
• Include making lists, as this is the best place to start.

It’s time to discover the incredible power of making lists.

Making Lists: A Productivity Superpower

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey outlines his Time Management Matrix. To begin using the Matrix, we must first make lists of everything concerning us before sorting them into 4 groups. Similarly, the Bullet Journaling Method suggests that making bulleted lists of ideas and tasks, as well as of the events on our calendar is an effective way to start organising ourselves and making progress towards our goals. The Getting Things Done (GTD) task management system also advocates making lists.

So, what secret power does making lists hold if it’s central to three of the best-known productivity and organisational systems out there?

Making lists can help:

• Clear the mind.
• Give us perspective.
• Increase motivation.
• Facilitate prioritising and managing tasks.

The power of making lists, then, should not be underestimated. Let’s explore each of the ways it can help us in more detail.

Lists clear the mind

We are bombarded with ceaseless distractions in the digital age. Not all these distractions are bad. Some can even give rise to new ideas and opportunities or inspire us to acquire and develop new skills.

By contrast, distractions can cause us to lose focus, stop effective analysis, and have a detrimental effect on work performance and productivity, among much else.

Making lists is a far more reliable way to track ideas and tasks, than trusting our own memory. Multiple factors affect the way we remember events, from the amount of emotional importance we attach to them, to the amount of sleep we had the night before a new memory is stored in the brain. This may distort details and reduce the accuracy of our memories.

Thus, the most accurate and effective way to record things is to get them out of our heads as soon as possible by jotting them down in a list. This unburdens the mind and helps us focus on the task in front of us. It makes us more receptive to new information, which can ease the process of learning and help us find more creative solutions to problems.

We will become more efficient when we write things down because it reduces the likelihood that we will forget anything vital. This will serve to lessen our anxiety, which can help us focus, and be secure in the knowledge that the critical information will be nearby when we need it.

We can gain perspective when we write lists

We have all developed certain habits — actions we perform without thinking. Good habits can help us advance towards success, while bad or unhealthy ones can kill our productivity and hold us back.

James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, introduces us to the idea of a Habit Scorecard. He emphasises how important it is if we want to form habits that help us achieve our goals. The first step to creating a Habit Scorecard is listing all the actions we perform in a day. We may only need to note the actions we take in a specific portion of our day, depending on what our goal is, but the mere act of making a list may prove helpful.

Writing things down on paper that we usually do on autopilot can give us perspective. It can help us pinpoint which actions are helping us reach our goals and which are not. We can use these Habit Scorecards to help identify, analyse, examine, and manage aspects of our behaviour that we may not otherwise have been aware of.  

Lists are a useful tool to have in our arsenal when we have too much on our plate, too. Listing all our tasks will give us perspective on all we have to accomplish and help us schedule and prioritise them accordingly. Next, let’s see how lists can help us focus and direct our attention.

Lists help us concentrate

Making lists helps us pinpoint our most important goals. If we list 25 things we want to achieve, then highlight the 5 we consider to be the most crucial, we can pinpoint the goals we wish to work towards whatever happens. The remaining goals on our lists are less important and are ones that we will pursue when we have achieved the 5 goals we have highlighted. We can thus use the power of making lists to make more intentional progress towards goals that matter to us and spend our time and energy more wisely.

Lists can motivate us

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in our brains. It is sometimes referred to as the pleasure chemical. It is a large part of what motivates us and pushes us to act. We get a dopamine hit when we accomplish something or reach a goal. This means that when we achieve something, there is a sense of momentum which then makes it easier to accomplish the next thing on our list.

The problem with this in relation to habits is that bad habits often offer almost instant rewards, in a way that good habits seldom do. To make up for this lack of instant gratification, when we are trying to develop good habits, we can use lists to our advantage.

If we record how often we perform actions that we seek to transform into habits, it will allow us to take pleasure in the process and feel a sense of accomplishment throughout that will keep our dopamine levels high. Therefore, we will be more motivated. This makes it far more likely that we will be able to be consistently productive. The more tasks we can complete, the more motivated we will be to work through the other tasks on our list.

Wrapping Up

Making lists is a fantastic, simple but effective way to begin building a first-rate organisational and productivity system. We’ve seen that making lists can help clear the mind, make it easier to focus, help identify our most important goals, as well as help hone our problem-solving skills. We can use lists to help us celebrate small wins, stay motivated and make progress towards our goals.

So why not take a leaf from a productivity guru’s book and start making lists to unlock your full potential today? Who knows? Perhaps harnessing the power of making lists will help you become a productivity guru too!