Be a Schedule Builder, Not a To-Do List Maker

Imagine you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, the phone’s operating system would crash. Will you continue to use this problematic phone? of course not. You will return it, give a bad review, and buy a new phone.

However, many people run on a problematic operating system their entire lives. This is the so-called to-do list. Have you ever seen someone live by to-do list and have really done all the things they said to do? I haven't seen it anyway.

The believers of the to-do list will record all the things they promised to accomplish, but at the end of the day, they are surprised to find that the unfinished to-do list has become longer, not shorter. The next day, they repeated this Sisyphus practice. Their days, months, and sometimes even their entire careers are spent in an endless busy schedule, even though they use a technology that should make them more efficient.

It’s time to get rid of the constant stress and guilt, because you haven’t ticked enough on the to-do list, you have to understand why running your life with to-do list is like running your life on Windows 95.

To free yourself from the tyranny of the to-do list, you must break the habit of telling you what to do by looking at the to-do list. So what are the alternatives? It's time to upgrade your life operating system and change it to a weekly schedule.

The schedule may seem simple, but most people do not do it (or do it correctly). They just fill in the time of one or two meetings on the calendar, and the rest are blank. A better way is to use what psychologists call "setting execution intentions," which is a fancy term that refers to deciding what you want to do and when to do it.

Planning ahead of how you plan to spend your time is the only way to know the difference between traction (what you say you want to do) and distraction (anything else).

Planning through the calendar is not only useful for work-related tasks. We can also set aside time for our important relationships and investment ourselves. This approach can solve the three main problems of using to-do list to schedule a day.

First of all, being a schedule maker instead of a to-do list maker can build a better self-image. As we have learned, it is a bad idea to measure yourself by how many tick you tick on the to-do list. People are very bad at predicting how long a task will take to complete, so we are habitually unable to complete tasks on the to-do list. From now on, the standard to measure yourself is not to see what you have accomplished, but to see whether you have done what you said to do, and do it without distraction.

Finally, using a calendar can ease the feeling that you should do other things, thereby recreating the joy of life. If you arrange time to play video games, you have nowhere to go, and there is nothing else you should do. You can finally enjoy leisure time without guilt. In fact, when you schedule time for fun, going to work now becomes a distraction, because this is not something you plan to do with your time.