If you have a love-hate relationship with lists of all kinds, you aren’t alone. On one hand, making a list–whether it’s a grocery list or a to-do list–gives you a single place to keep all your priorities front and center. But that same list can also be a source of anxiety. The longer it gets, the more you may find yourself avoiding it, knowing that the effort it’ll take to cross everything off is going to be considerable.

But as it turns out, you’ll be much more productive if you actually read your to-do list regularly–even if you don’t manage to finish every single item that’s on it. Here’s why.

Related: How Writing To Do Lists Helps Your Brain

Helping Your Brain See Opportunities

The human brain is very good at what psychologists refer to as “opportunistic planning.” What this means is that when you have a goal that you’re actively trying to achieve, you’re much more likely to notice things in your world that will help you reach that goal. Reading over your to-do list helps remind you what you’re trying to accomplish in the first place. That much is obvious.

Less obvious is the way this awareness primes your mind to problem-solve. If you’re familiar with what you need to get done, then when you bump into a key resource who can help you complete a task, you’ll immediately connect that person to whatever you’re trying to do. As a result, you can successfully knock items off your agenda even when you didn’t expect to accomplish them.

This is especially helpful for delegating parts of complicated tasks. It’s often helpful to get input from your colleagues over the course of a challenging project. But once you sit down to chip away at it, it can feel like a hassle to reach out to other people; it’s easier to just power through the task in front of you, even when you know that someone else’s work or input might improve the outcome. If you’re already thinking about the tasks on your list, though, since you read through it regularly, you’re more likely to be able to preempt this by reaching out to people ahead of time.

And even when you forget to do that, if you randomly bump into a colleague whose assistance could help you out, you’ll know automatically how to enlist their help.