What To-Do Lists Do For Your Brain

To keep a thorough to-do list, to be totally on top of the expectations placed on you, is to free your mind to reach its full potential. It gives your brain permission to explore, permission to wander when it wishes to, permission to operate at its highest capacity. Emptying your mind into a to-do list is like lubricating the gears on your bicycle. Everything moves faster and smoother. And you can go further.

There's a reason a clear mind works better than a full one. Your brain isn't made to multitask. It's meant to specialize. It wants to focus and find a state of flow. It's your impatient, primitive being that wants to be constantly rewarded and distracted. So externalize the demands of life. Externalize the routine tasks, the boring stuff, the important stuff—everything—onto a to-do list, a daily checklist and/or a calendar. It's only after externalizing every worry and reminder that your brain will wake up, come up with ideas and learn to enjoy the moment.

We all know someone who seems to have an atmosphere of chaos and panic around them. They are constantly rushing from one pressing issue to another, never ready for the next task, always being interrupted and having life thrown at them instead of calmly handed to them. They never get the chance to approach a task in their own time, in their own way, calm and prepared. If you go back to the Eisenhower Matrix you learned in College 101, these are the people who are stuck in Quadrants 1 and 3, the quadrants where the time-sensitive tasks pile up, both important and unimportant. And they feel like there’s no way out. Once you’re chained to the never-ending list of urgent things to do, there’s no clear way of escape.

But fear ye not! There is a way of escape, and the way comes in two parts. First, you must eliminate the urgent but non-important tasks completely: most phone calls, texts, emails and social media notifications, people who show up at your desk asking for favors, last-minute parties and coffee-spills. Next, you must keep a to-do list that lists everything you have to get done. Everything. Tell yourself that you need to shower. Tell yourself to check out that article or that movie, don’t rely on your brain to keep the title in mind until you have time to look it up. Instead, dump everything, every task, every memo, every idea, into something other than your brain. Then, only then, with a clear mind and clear and meaningful goals, you can relax and focus on doing good work, one task at a time. Once you get to the point where you trust your to-do list more than your own brain, you will move toward trusting your brain to do and be other things than an overloaded, full-to-bursting file folder. You will call on it to be creative, to spend more time being focused, to do a phenomenal job instead of a satisfactory one.

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