Is a to-do list the best solution for tasks?

To-do lists exist to help us remember things. I don’t take it as a surprise: my memory sucks big time and it always has. To say it’s selective is an understatement: random useless facts are hugely favoured, but never mind remembering that very important thing I need to do next Tuesday.

So I started using to-do lists. And soon realized they share a problem.

First, here’s why to-do lists are great: they help us list (obviously) the stuff we need to do, set priorities, even organize them by groups of things or projects. So what’s wrong with them? Well, while they’re great at listing stuff, they suck at setting limits to how much stuff we can get done.

Meetings, in that sense, get some things right. Ask any manager and he’ll say meetings suck unless you have a clear agenda and schedule. Agendas help us understand the rough amount of time a meeting requires. This in turn helps us decide if we’ll need a full hour, two hours or if we can just drop by a colleague’s desk and chat for five minutes.

The foundation of a meeting, then, is time. We need a certain amount of time to do something, and we know that time is limited. Especially because there are other scheduled meetings before and after.

In short, meetings are context-sensitive.