Rethink Your To-Do List: How Numbering Tasks Can Boost Your Happiness

I have ONE strategy to maintain my health and well-being. Just one: rethinking my to-do lists.

You see, I love making daily to-do lists…but my daily to-do lists don’t love me back. Every Friday morning, I review my past week and create to-do lists for the following week.

Reviewing my lists and realizing that I only accomplished half, or sometimes less than half, makes me feel down. With that depressive feeling, I start asking myself a series of “why” questions:

• Why am I even writing to-do lists in the first place?
• Why bother crossing them off? (since I have so few to put lines through)
• Why do I keep putting X marks next to items that make me feel bad?
• Why, why, why?

Despite my militant nature (according to my sister), I promptly start writing the lists again every Friday morning and go through the unhappy moments the following week.

But one day, while staring at my half-checked list, a lightbulb went off.

I realized my to-do list review process was wrong. Seeing 12 to-do list items and getting checkmarks next to only 4, I realized that those four items didn’t have the same weight as the remaining eight items.

Here are my TOP four items I did last week with the checkmarks next to them:

1. Submitting a proposal to a potential client on Wednesday (two days earlier than the intended Friday deadline—the biggest to-do list item in running my business)
2. Writing outlines for 2 (out of 3) weekly blog posts
3. Publishing a longer blog post on Thursday (keeping a promise to myself that I would keep this list as my number one priority)
4. Quarterly business tax reporting document submission (there would be a huge negative consequence if I didn’t meet the deadline)

Seeing that I hadn’t finished the 8 remaining items with big X marks next to them (e.g., bank statements review, Amazon order for a bunch of things, monthly cleaning that has been delayed once again) gave me an unusual feeling. A feeling of…liberation?

I realized the importance of the numbering of each task item.

There were reasons why I numbered each task item in order of importance. In other words, working on the proposal was a far more important task (which I knew but forget to remind myself) than monthly cleaning.

I realized that finishing the TOP-numbered items is significantly more important (necessary) than the BOTTOM ones.

With that switch in my thinking, I immediately felt better and start adding the numbers to the list (aka wellness strategy).

Being easy on myself and having newfound wisdom toward my to-do (or not-to-do) list strategy was a necessary step in my wellness journey.

Learning to recognize the difference between the quality of different task items in a day is a necessary step in my overall happiness level I can control.

However, my sister had to remind me that by delaying the monthly cleaning time for the third time, the “monthly” cleaning schedule becomes a “quarterly” task rather than a “monthly” kind.

Ah, well. At least my proposal got sent out early!

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