Like many busy people, I keep a running to-do list (I’ve been using Evernote). I have one list for my personal task, and one for my work tasks. The lists never really shrink. It seems that for every “buy new pillows”, there is at least one “give $50 to super for fixing toilet”.

However, I can’t seem to live without it. To me, it serves as a part of the brain that us humans (at least me) have been born without. An area in which we can keep lists of things for months without forgetting them. I need some kind of Faceral Lobe (Facere is latin for “to do”). Maybe in the future we’ll have a chip to add this functionality to our brain, but for right now I need my to-do lists.

So you can imagine my disheartened surprise when I learned from the Harvard Business Review that keeping a to-do list is an exercise in futility. Instead, researchers recommend “Living the Calendar”, which essentially means transferring everything from your to-do list into your calendar to give it a specific deadline and time length.

Personally, I refuse. My to-do lists keep me going, and gives me a sense of control over my life. For most every attack on the to-do list, I’ve got a parry: [click to continue…]