My wife has issues with to-do lists. She’ll sit and write down 40 things she wants to get done in a day.
• Make grocery list
• Go to the grocery store
• Clean bedroom
• Complete powerpoint slides for a one-hour presentation
• Discuss presentation with co-presenter
• Attend thirty-minute meeting on the other side of town
• Weed the flower beds
• Do four loads of laundry
• 45-minute work call
• Wash and vacuum both cars
• Bring the car to get the oil changed and inspected
• Look for new rug for the living room
Can you see the very obvious problem with this to-do list?
That’s more than a week work worth of things to get done.
That kind of list leads to one thing – disappointment and sadness (okay, that’s two things, but you get the point)
This ain’t gonna work. If your lists look like this, I heard a great place to start the other day.
It’s called the reverse to-do list. I can’t remember where I heard it, but when I went to look it up it seems like lots of people have been talking about. And rightly so.
Here’s what you do.
Instead of leading with the to-do list, finish with it.
Write down everything you do in a day. Do it backward. Record what you do.
Doing it this way will show you what you can accomplish in a day, so you can make slightly more realistic plans in the future. And it will show you where just maybe you could have done a little better. You know, maybe in retrospect, the three separate trips to the grocery store didn’t make a lot of sense.
This may keep you from running around in circles and feeling like you didn’t check enough things off your list.
Test it out for a week and see if it helps.
Looking for more ways to get better? Join me and hundreds of other PA students and PAs inside of the Physician Assistant Exam Scholars program.
Brian Wallace
