I’ve always been a list-maker. My poor husband shudders when he sees me in list-making mode. Invariably some items on the list get done and others don’t. Why?

I’ve always used my list making as a brain dump or a mind-sweep. A list of every wishful whim that I have at the moment, peppered with meatier “have to dos” and “NEED to dos”. I’ve never really thought about it in detail, but there was always a prioritization process that occurred when reviewing the list and the stuff that never got done was chucked out as unimportant or irrelevant at the moment (or shifted to the next list).

I’ve been taking a course since January that has been causing me to rethink a lot about what I do, who I am and where I want to be going. One of the ideas within the course is that we are constantly filtering the world around us. The analogy used in the course was that a person uninterested in sports will unconsciously filter all inputs relating to sports out of their awareness, however someone who is interested in sports will be more aware of any and all inputs around them that pertain to sports. I’m sure that everyone has experienced this in their everyday life, have you ever started thinking about something and then started seeing that thing everywhere? Did that thing just enter your universe or were you previously unaware that it was always there?

Jo VanEvery recently had a post about planning, organizing and goal setting. In it, she shows a clothesline holding her to do list as a way to identify and focus on the tasks at hand. This is a much more visual and artistic way to manage ‘the list’ than my notebook (especially with the multiple coloured pieces of paper), but I’ve just learned that there is an actual term for what we are both doing. Mark Forster’s Autofocus system is a mechanism for prioritizing your never-ending to do list in a notebook format – which might be more amenable for the less artistic ones among us (like me). Coupling this technique with David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner (which I learned about in my course) – delivers an exceptionally powerful tool kit to organize your tasks and help get things done. I’m still learning these tools and trying to put them into practice, but I’m pretty excited about the results I am seeing thus far.