How to Review Your Tasks

Why Should You Review Your Tasks?

If you're anything like me, there'll be much more on your to-do list than you could conceivably hope to complete in the next couple of months, never mind the next couple of days - and will range from the small and short-term, like pick up the dry-cleaning, to more far-reaching projects, such as install solar-water heating.

But fear not. That's a good thing. The more tasks you can push into tedium, the less you have to worry about remembering yourself, which means that you free up more of your brain to actually do the things that are on your list.

Most of the time, you shouldn't be looking at the 'All tasks' list - there's too much there to distract you and worry about. Instead, you should be looking at one of the lists of things due soon; or the list of items tagged with whichever tags are relevant to your focus right now.

What If I Forget About Something Important?

The only problem with keeping huge swathes of your tasks out-of-sight is that they'll also be out-of-mind. Whilst that's the whole idea behind not having all your tasks on display, it could mean that you'll forget about something that's time-critical until it's too late, or that you won't ever get round to pursuing that new hobby because you're always caught up in the stuff that absolutely-has-to-be-done and it just languishes in a forgotten corner of your to-do items.

That's where the Review comes in.

The Review is where you sit down with your 'All tasks' list, and run through each item, one-by-one. For each task, you should check...

...that it still belongs on the list. Be ruthless with yourself, and don't let the baggage of what you should do get in the way of what you will do. If, realistically, this task is just going to sit on your to-do list forever, mocking you, then 'Abandon' it to the ether and stop it from dragging you down.
...whether it needs some action soon. You should be looking for tasks that you'll need to do something about before your next Review. If it is something you need to worry about, then make sure that it will appear on your regular lists in tedium. Personally, I have a special 'focus' tag that I use for this purpose - when doing the review, I add the 'focus' tag to anything that I need to be focusing on, and then as part of my daily routine I check the list of tasks tagged with 'focus'.
...whether it still deserves your immediate attention. This is the flip-side of the previous point. If you've taken a project to a point where it no longer requires you to keep working on it just this minute, it could be that there are other projects which are more deserving of your attention. Don't let things hog your focus if others should be taking their place.
...whether you've gotten stuck with this task. If a task has been sat on your list of things to do for weeks or months, then maybe you should take a minute or two to think about why that is? Are you stuck with what you should be doing to progress with the task (in which case, try splitting the task up into a number of smaller, more achievable steps in order to get moving on it)? Or is it something you want to do, but haven't found time for it yet? (In which case, decide whether it's okay for it to remain in the "I'll do it someday" bucket, or whether you need to raise its priority and start making some inroads into it.)

By the time you get to the end of your list of tasks, you can then concentrate on doing the stuff you've decided is most important, without any nagging doubts or worries that there's something you've missed.

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