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Why your to-do list never ends: 7 ways to make it doable

Most to-do lists have the same items sitting on them for weeks: “Work on project”, “Taxes”, “Exercise”. You read them every morning, and they are still there every evening. It is easy to blame willpower. More often, the problem is how the items are written.

We have long known that unfinished goals linger in the mind (the Zeigarnik effect). In studies by Masicampo and Baumeister, unfinished goals led to intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task and to worse performance on an anagram task (DeepDyve summary). When participants made a concrete plan for those goals, these effects disappeared (Academia.edu). That research looked at planning, not at list formats. Still, a well-written list can work as a small plan. The seven ways below are aimed at exactly that.

1. Turn vague items into a first physical step

“Work on project” is not a task. It is the name of an area. It doesn’t tell you when you will start, where you will be, or what you will touch first. In the same research, a plan reduced the mental interference only to the extent that it made a real contribution to the goal (Masicampo & Baumeister 2011). The finding isn’t about lists, but it suggests a reasonable inference for them. Starting each item with a concrete verb, and keeping it small enough to finish in one sitting, may be a good place to begin.

Before: Work on project

After: Open the deck, sketch two chart drafts for slide 3

2. Break big jobs into pieces

People consistently underestimate how long tasks will take. This is called the planning fallacy. In one study, students predicted they would finish their theses in 33.9 days on average. The theses actually took 55.5 days (Buehler, Griffin & Ross 1994). That was longer than even the students’ worst-case estimate of 48.6 days (Dave Stuart Jr.).

I won’t claim that splitting a task reliably corrects this bias. The practical benefit is plain, though. “Move house” never gets crossed off. “Get three quotes from movers” can be done in an afternoon.

Before: Move house

After:

3. Stop piling everything onto one list

On one long list, “pay the bill” sits next to “write my career plan”, and the bill usually wins. Zhu, Yang and Hsee call this the mere urgency effect. Across five experiments, people chose urgent-looking tasks with lower payoffs over more important ones, even when the usual explanations were ruled out (Journal of Consumer Research, 2018).

Split your list in two. Keep Today to three to five items, and make one of them important but not urgent. Everything else goes on a Someday list.

Before: Reply to emails, return parcel, write book, book haircut, study English, pay bill

After (Today): Pay bill · Drop parcel at the post office · Write chapter 2 for 30 minutes

After (Someday): Look into English courses · Book haircut

4. Stop rolling tasks over day after day

I couldn’t find direct research on this, so this section rests on observation. An item carried over for three days usually points to a problem with the item itself, not with you. It may be vague, it may be too big, or it may no longer matter. Instead of moving it again, do one of four things: redefine it, split it, give it a time, or delete it.

Before: Call Mum (carried over, day 4)

After: Sunday 11:00, after breakfast, call Mum

5. Write an if–then plan

An implementation intention is an if–then plan that specifies when, where and how you will act (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021). That paper reports that in Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s 2006 meta-analysis, these plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65). They showed a similar effect on the problem of getting started (d = 0.61) (Gollwitzer, NCI PDF). These findings concern goal pursuit in general, but the idea is easy to apply to a list.

Example: If I get back to my desk after lunch, then I’ll put my phone in the drawer and write the report’s opening paragraph.

6. Estimate time from past experience

In my experience, most of us picture the task going smoothly when we estimate. Ask a different question instead: “The last time I did something like this, how long did it actually take?” For a few weeks, write your estimate and the real time next to each item. If the gap always points the same way, scale up your next estimates by that amount.

Before: Write report (1 hour)

After: Report draft. Took 2.5 hours last time, so I’ve set aside 3

7. Write tomorrow’s list at the end of the day

In a study by Scullin and colleagues, 57 healthy adults aged 18 to 30 spent five minutes writing before overnight sleep recording in a sleep lab. They were randomly split into two groups. One group wrote a to-do list for the coming days. The other wrote about tasks they had recently completed. The researchers then compared how much difficulty the two groups had falling asleep (PubMed). Drawing on this work, the researchers suggest taking five minutes before bed to write tomorrow’s list out in detail rather than turning it over in your head (Baylor University).

The study has limits. There was no group that wrote nothing, and none of the participants had sleep problems (BPS Research Digest). So treat this as a sensible way to close the day, not as a sleep technique.

Where you keep the list matters less. It could be paper or a notes app on your phone. It could also be an app where you track daily routines, such as Diril. The real difference comes from how the items are written.

A 10-minute checklist

Open your current list and ask these questions about each item:

Ten minutes later, your list will probably be shorter, and the items on it will be more likely to get done.