Originally appeared on: http://web.archive.org/web/20220527193713/https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/productivity/project-management/consolidate-your-to-do-list-with-a-weekly-review
If your task list is scattered over numerous pages and you’re bogged down with too many items, use a weekly review to consolidate. Get-It-Done Guy explains how to cull your task lists, project lists, and someday/maybe lists into one streamlined master plan.
February 12, 2019
To-do lists are awesome. They really are. They’re so awesome that you can collect dozens of them, all different types. There are to-do lists written on sticky notes. To-do lists in notebooks. To-do lists scribbled on napkins. And then there are computers. And the to-do lists typed into memos. The to-do lists in to-do list apps that you downloaded and used for a week. Yes, life is overflowing with to-do lists.
In short, by replacing the dozens of to-do lists with a single Long List, you’ll solve the problem of having dozens of lists. You’ll have one place where you know you can find your tasks. Chaos solved…
Items Accumulate
Sort of. Having one master list solves the problem of scattering your to-do’s far and wide. But there’s still a dastardly problem lurking beneath the surface: accumulation.
Over time, you add things to the list. Then your priorities change. Or you get interrupted. Or your dog eats your homework. And even though an item is done or no longer relevant, you forget to remove it from your list. Given a few weeks or months, your list is no longer very accurate. It has stuff that’s been done, it has stuff that you no longer need to do, and it has stuff that society expects you to do, but you don’t want to do (Yay for individuality! You do you!).
A Weekly Review Will Save You
To keep your system working smoothly, start doing a Weekly Review of your task list.
In a weekly review, you’ll do a spring cleaning of your task list. Only, you’ll do it in all four seasons. But you’ll think about spring every time. Here’s how it would work:
Step 1. Consolidate & Prune
Step 2. Projectify & Grow
Step 3. Grow … or Prune
Consolidate
When your to-do items are spread out over many pages, mixing up done items and to-be-done items, it gets hard to scan quickly and know what’s on your plate. Starting with the oldest item on your to-do list, scan forward.
Look at each item that isn’t marked complete. Make a decision. If it is no longer relevant, cross it off. I like to draw a little down arrow next to it, which means it’s been dropped from the list.
If it’s still something you want to do, copy it to the end of your list. Draw a little rightward pointing arrow next to it, so you know it’s been moved later on the list.
For pages that only have a few undone tasks, I copy those tasks to the end of the list and then toss the pages. And remember those sticky notes? Or the napkins with to-do items? Grab them all and consolidate them into your master list. Then throw away the other papers, leaving yourself with one master list. Now it’s time to prioritize…
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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