On To-do Lists vs Daily Planners

Benjamin Franklin is the godfather of the to-do list.

He would create detail lists of everything that he needed to do

and what time he would get it done.

He would start his day with prayer and personal hygiene and planning.

After a long day of work he would wrap it up with a review

of what was done that day.

The challenge is that most of us have lists that have grown

completely out of control.

Every day our list grows longer and longer and it's harder to manage.

So do lists actually work.

On today's episode, I'm going to share with you how to tame your to-do list,

how to think about your to-do list, and actually use a list to get more done.

I'm Amin Ahmed, and welcome to Be Well, Do Well.

The first thing I want to talk about is that your to-do list is not a plan.

Someone once told me that your to-do list is sort of like a grocery list.

It's all the things that you need.

Whereas your daily plan is like your meal plan.

So you wouldn't just go to the grocery store and just grab random things

off the shelf, come home, and then sit there and go, All right, what

am I gonna make with all of this?

I mean, some of you might, but generally speaking, you have a meal

plan and then you get the ingredients that you need for that meal.

Otherwise, what happens is that you end up with missing ingredients, for

example, or too much of something, or too little of something.

Your to-do list is sort of like that.

Once you've got a plan, maybe a daily, quarterly, weekly, monthly,

annual, even your life plan, then you can start bringing it back in

towards your day and decide well, from that giant plan that I have.

Let's say your plan is to get 50 new clients this month.

Well, if your plan is to get 50 new clients and you break it all down, you

say, okay, what do I need to do every in order to get closer to my goal.

So your to-do list is really just the itemized things that need to be

done that support your overall plan.

So now that you've got this idea that your to-do list is

not actually your daily plan.

Let's now talk about why it's so difficult sometimes to get these things done.

I may have talked about this before on a previous episode about this idea

of chronotypes, and I love this idea.

I read this in a number of different books, and the way a chronotype works is

that it's your energy compared to other's.

And so generally speaking, you've got your days that you wake

up and then you go to sleep.

That's considered your circadian rhythm, whereas your chronotype

defines your energy within that day.

So the 24 hours you've got, what time you wake up and what time you go to

sleep, that's your circadian rhythm.

But inside of those 24 hours have a lot more energy, sometimes in the

beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end of the day,

and where your energy is and your pattern that defines your chronotype.

There's generally three types of chronotype.

The first is your morning larc, that's your early bird.

Those are the ones that get up very early between five and let's say seven.

Then you've got kind of the later morning birds, those we refer to as the dove.

And the dove is where you're sort of a morning bird, but you're gonna be

waking up just a little bit later.

And then in the other end of the spectrum, you've got your night owl.

You're sleeping late, you're waking up late, and your energy is very different

compared to your lark and your dove.

We've got a quiz on our website, so you can go ahead and head over

there to bewelldowell.fm and there's a chronotype quiz that you'll

answer a number of questions.

So I think there's 19 question.

Answer those questions and it'll actually tell you exactly which chronotype you are.

Once you know that you're either a morning lark or a dove or a night owl, what you

can do is then you can plan your day.

Remember all the items that you have in that list.

Now you can take that and you can plan your day based on when you

naturally have the most energy.

This is so important because you wanna make sure that you're actually working

when you have the energy to work.

So if you are a morning lark, like me, I wake up quite early.

If 5:00 AM I'm awake before my kids are awake.

I've got two hours to get some work done, and that's when I have the most

amount of creative energy and focus is the first thing in the morning.

So between five and seven, that's when I'm the most productive and creative.

Then later in the morning, I move over to more admin related tasks,

and in the afternoon after lunch.

I'm useless.

When one o'clock runs, rolls around between noon and two o'clock.

I definitely try not to have any big meetings, try not to make big

decisions, and it's really hard for me to create anything at that time.

But in the evening, as it gets closer to dinner time and afterwards

I start getting more energy.

And that's the time when I start to use that energy not for work cause

I've already ended my work day.

I use that energy towards connection with friends and family.

Those are the things that I do when I have that type of energy in the evening,

A night owl is actually flipped upside down.

They have a lot more energy in the morning to connect with people

and do those sorts of things.

But in the evening is when they have the most amount of energy

to do creative work and regular, you know, daily job type work.

Take The quiz on the website.

You'll learn a lot about yourself, whether you're a morning clerk

or a dove or a night owl.

And then you can download our planner as well, which has a little strip along

the side and it shows you when your energy is gonna be the most and least.

If you have, so let's say you have meetings, you wanna plan those?

Not for me, not after lunch, when I have the least amount of energy and

I'm just not feeling myself and I'm not present, but plan it near the end of

my day or maybe right after breakfast.

If you plan your work when you have the most amount of energy, you'll find

that you'll actually get more done.

Combine this with other techniques like deep work and focus, and maybe

using music to get you into a rhythm of working without any distractions.

But the main thing I'm trying to get here is that if you work, when

you have the right amount of energy and the right type of energy, you'll

definitely get more done, and you'll find that your to-do list actually

starts to shrink and shrink and shrink.

Recap here would be that your to-do list is not the same as your daily plan.

Your grocery list is not same as your meal plan.

Think of it that way, and it'll be a lot easier to understand when to

make a to-do list, when to make a plan, and how they connect together.

Second point is that you need to know your chronotype.

If you are a morning lark or a dove or a night owl, plan your work around the

time that you have the most amount of energy and the right types of energy.

And lastly, work when you have energy, just like I mentioned with the

chronotypes, is that get your work done when you have those types of energy,

focus, creative, administrative, and you'll end up getting a lot

more done and your list will shrink.

You can download the planner on our website and you can do the quiz on our

website as well bewelldowell.fm and I'll put a link in the show notes down below.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

On our next episode, we're gonna tie into this a little bit and talk

about why you feel tired throughout the day, even though you may be

getting a lot of sleep at night.

I hope you join me tomorrow.

Thanks again for making the Be Well, Do Well Podcast a part of