My Relationship with My To Do List

By Jasper Weinburd, @weinburd

Disclaimer: I am a neurotypical, white, cisgender man. Strategies that work for me may or may not work for you. I believe time management is a deeply personal skill. I hope that some element of my philosophy rings true for you and that whatever doesn’t fit may provide some perspective or remind you that you are not alone in having difficulties with your To Do List.

So, tell me, Reader, how do you feel about your relationship with your To Do List?

My To Do List and I have a standing meeting every week where we reset our expectations for each other. Every Monday, I log on to a Zoom call with two other young faculty where we chat for a few minutes to catch up—what used to happen around the coffee maker—and then mute ourselves and turn our attention to our individual To Do Lists. The goal of the next half hour is to take each item from our To Do List and assign it a specific time on that week’s schedule. By the end of the exercise, we know exactly which tasks will be done by the end of the week, we know when we will do them, and we have consciously decided what can wait undone until next Monday. This process decreases my anxiety throughout the week and enables me to focus on each task as it comes. Not only does this make me more productive, but I no longer feel guilty about not finishing everything the way that I used to.

Before I learned to bring this intentionality to managing my time, I had a very unhealthy relationship with my To Do List. I was a graduate student and my To Do List lived on an unruled 8½ by 11-inch sheet of white paper that I kept on a clipboard in my backpack. It had everything on it: teaching items like “prep class”, research tasks as specific as “read paper X” and as general as “write thesis”, and personal things like “get a haircut”. It had old reminders from last year, right next to brand new thoughts from that morning. It had check marks and cross outs and colors to highlight important items. It often continued off its optimistic single sheet of printer paper with more lists on scrap paper and sticky notes, and of course I was constantly cross referencing my To Do List with the many emails in my inbox that I had marked unread for further follow up.

If any of this organizational fiasco sounds familiar, I’m betting that the feelings that went with it will resonate as well. I was alternatingly comforted and terrified by my To Do List. I was glad to have everything written down, so that I knew nothing would be lost to absentmindedness. But every time I looked at my To Do List I was reminded of everything still to do. It got to the point where just extracting my To Do List from my backpack took significant courage and I waded through swamps of anxiety before actually tackling anything more than the most menial task. The biggest and most important projects (e.g., “write thesis”) often sat the longest on my To Do List. I had no mechanism by which to decompose these large goals into manageable tasks. The anxiety of facing such monolithic objectives often pushed me to want to finish something and I would instead focus on the (less vital) tasks that were easiest to complete. My To Do List had a paradoxical power over me: I needed it to feel that everything was under control and yet it perpetuated a creeping and pervasive feeling that all was not well.

That feeling pushed its way into all aspects of my life. I thought of my To Do List in every moment my brain wasn’t actively engaged; between exercises at the gym, between bites at dinner, and anytime my partner allowed a lull in our conversation. That only started to change when I finally began seeing a therapist. Besides weekly psychotherapy, which has guided me on a path of personal growth, my therapist did two things that made all the difference for me and my To Do List.

First, she suggested that I join a Thesis Support Group through my university’s counseling center. This was a small community of other grad students where I could see my own difficulties reflected in a way that told me I wasn’t a failure for struggling. There were elements of accountability in the structure of our meetings, but most of all it was a place where I could acknowledge parts of myself that I’d previously thought unacceptable—things like imperfection, being human, and procrastination as a manifestation of anxiety. Today, the colleagues on my Monday morning Zoom calls provide similar support, and I count this community as an important ingredient for healthy productivity.

The second thing my therapist did was point me towards the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD). The NCFDD is an organization devoted to the professional development of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. They take a holistic approach to helping us manifest our full potential. Their philosophy prioritizes healthy relationships and a sustainable work-life balance. What I love about their programming is that, in addition to helping you accomplish more, it focuses on a change of mindset so that you can feel proud about what you accomplish.

NCFDD memberships are offered on the individual level (great use of start-up funds) and on an institutional level (you may already have access!). Through a basic membership you can watch the webinars in their core curriculum, available monthly throughout the year or asynchronously whenever you want. They also offer writing challenges with peer accountability and “bootcamp” workshops that span several weeks with one-on-one mentoring. While I haven’t tried these, I’ve heard wonderful reviews from colleagues who have. The first webinar in their curriculum Every Semester Needs a Plan is available without a membership, and is especially relevant now as we begin the spring term.. This webinar gave me a process for breaking down large goals into smaller tasks that can be accomplished within a single week or day.

My favorite tool that I learned from NCFDD is the Weekly Planning Meeting, which I described earlier, where I map the items from my To Do List onto my calendar for the coming week. Having that schedule for the week decreases my stress and allows me to be present with each activity as it comes. It’s similar to making a monthly financial budget for yourself; you can buy a cookie without worrying because you know you’ve already allocated enough money to pay rent. Inevitably, my To Do List does not all fit onto my calendar. But now that I’ve planned out the whole week, I can see that it would have been unrealistic to try to fit everything in—no human could have done it without Hermione’s time-turner! This is helping me to let go of the guilt I used to carry when tasks lingered on my To Do List.

Today, my To Do List lives on my iPad. There are countless apps and associated methods to help manage your time (e.g., the GTD method and the Todoist app). But since I prefer the tactile experience of hand-writing my tasks, I simply use a document in the app Notability. Each week I “auto populate” my repeating responsibilities simply by copy-pasting last week’s list. The result is a continually updated To Do List and a record of all the things I’ve accomplished: more than 80 pages of tasks and checkmarks to scroll through and feel good about. You can see an example To Do List and calendar week in the image at the top of this page. You’ll notice I no longer write huge goals on my To Do List and you’ll see that I’ve left myself time to stop working and eat lunch (most days, at least).

This Weekly Planning Meeting certainly didn’t fix all my time management issues overnight, but it gave me a framework that provides some steadiness and resilience to the difficulties that I was facing with my To Do List. I especially still struggle with procrastination, setting overly optimistic expectations, and perfectionism. But through years of practicing the Weekly Planning Meeting (on and off, to be honest) and by learning from the rest of NCFDD’s curriculum I’ve gained some personal insight into how, for me, time management is more of an emotional skill than a logistical one.

National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity Resources:

Other’s experiences on related topics:

Jasper Weinburd is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. He’s currently searching for a place to make his academic home.

COMMUNITY, MAA LEADERS, TEACHING & LEARNINGAnnie PetittJasper Weinburd, time management, To Do List, personal growth, working with anxiety