Lists: Make 'em and be ahead of the game!

12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done Lifehack Productivity

At the center of just about every personal productivity system are lists – GTD has it’s context lists, grandma had hers on the refrigerator door. There are bucket lists, emergency phone lists, wish lists . . . . I remember making lists for the guys who were going in to do the shopping when I lived in Zimbabwe. We tried to make the list in the order they would find the stuff in the store. Funny exercise to try to visualise the supermarket while sitting at my kitchen table.

Lists in general are powerful tools – open-ended, constantly growing, and effective at extending our memories past the number of things we can keep on our mind at any given time.

According to Dustin Wax, some of the lists that can make you more productive or otherwise make life easier include:

1. Task lists: Naturally, the most obvious is the task list, a simple list of things you have to do. A running list of the tasks you have to get done can make your life significantly easier, provided you use it religiously. (For more information about task lists, check out Dustin's “Back to Basics” post from last year.)
2. Project planning: Creating a list of tasks associated with a projects can be a great way to wrap your head around the project, as well as a prompt for what to do next when you finish a task. And a list of projects will help you make sure you’re keeping up with all your commitments.
3. Wish lists: A wishlist is a list of things you want to buy but don’t need right away. For example, I want a new electric guitar, but I’m not going to run out and buy one. When you have the money, or the time, you can take out your list and see what you want most of all.
4. Grocery/shopping lists: One of my most effective lists is a simple one-page list I made of all the groceries I regularly bought, arranged in the order I’d find them at my local store, with a few blank spaces every so often for one-off additions. Every week, I’d print it off, cross off anything I didn’t need, and add anything that wasn’t on the list, and go shopping.
5. Gift ideas: Nothing’s worse than the approach of Christmas with no idea of what to get someone close to you. Keep a list of odd, attractive, or just-right-for-you-know-who items throughout the year to help make Christmas, birthday, and anniversary shopping less stressful.
6. Checklists: Any recurrent multi-step tasks – like packing for a business trip, arranging a presentation, or winterizing your home – can be done more easily and with fewer errors if you write up a simple checklist of all the steps involved and equipment needed.
7. Reading journal: Keep a reading journal. Basically, this is a list of books you’ve read with notes and adequate information to recall the text later.
8. Links and logins: In these days of proliferating web applications, almost everyone has dozens, if not hundreds, of websites they need to log into on a regular basis. Keeping a list of all these sites and your login info can be a lifesaver! Also, if you keep a list online, you can have active links to each application, making a pretty useful start page.
9. Life lists: A list of your short- and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects. I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.
10. Reference: Any information you find yourself referring to often can make a useful list – metric conversions, file types, software registration keys, birthdays, the names of your children, whatever.
11. Logs: Broadly speaking, a log is a list of events tied to specific dates/times. Keeping a list of your exercise achievements, food consumption, words written, or other set of data appropriate for your projects will help you measure your progress as well as identify problems (like if your output drops on certain days of the week or month, or you seem to crave certain foods on certain days).
12. Daily summaries: A one- or two-line summary of the day’s events can help to remind you of problems that arose as well as how you dealt with them, as well as track behavioral patterns that might point to illness, conflict with certain people, or other issues.

Check out Dustin Wax on Twitter:@dwax. Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack.

Comments? What kinda lists do you find helpful?

List making is as personal as just about anything and to work your system is the key to the power behind lists.