Conquering Your To-Do List

Try This Today

• Turn your day’s to-do list into an acronym. Instead of trying to memorize — call Susan, allergy shot, refill prescription, eye doctor, send birthday card to Jack — "chunk" each item to create a word out of the first letters, in this case CARES, which is easier to remember than the individual tasks.
• Another option: Take the first letter of each task in your list and create a phrase or sentence. Rather than trying to remember “email John, dog grooming, gas up car, eat lunch with Holly,” you could say to yourself, “Each day gets easier.”
• Instead of memorizing your entire to-do list, categorize tasks into groups. For example, try to remember you have four things to do at your computer, two household jobs and three stops while driving around town.

Why

There’s an old adage: “The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.” That idea holds true when we’re remembering long to-do lists. One technique for doing that is called memory chunking, which involves creating smaller, more manageable groups of tasks and errands as opposed to one long list.