Why Our Brains Love Lists
And How To Make Better Ones
Lists help
us make sense of a chaotic and uncertain world, but we could be so much better
at what we're writing down.
It's
no secret that people love lists. Ten ways to do this, five ways to do that.
Lists are soothing. They're simple. They provide instant gratification and
purpose.
"We
like lists because we don't want to die," writer and philosopher Umberto Eco famously said. In 2010, Eco's fondness for
the list inspired
an exhibit at
the Louvre in Paris. In
an interview
around that time he asked: "How, as a human being, does one face infinity?
How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible?"
You
guessed it: Lists.
Neatly
stacked numbered towers of task that we can burn through one at a time and
cross off. I used to write things I already accomplished in the day on my to-do
list simply for the satisfaction of being able to cross them off. You know what
I'm talking about.
We
like lists because we don't want to die.
Psychologically,
the list enables us to digest information in bite-sized form rather than
tackling a giant tempest of tasks all at once. Lists gel well with the brain's
cognitive penchant for categorization. They minimize choice and make it easy to
process data. As Maria
Konnikova put it in the New Yorker, processing information in list-form is
"a bit like sipping green juice instead of munching on a bundle of
kale." It's just easier to digest.
But
how to make lists more useful in our lives?
Often
our to-do lists leave out a lot of tasks that occupy our attention. There's a
method to this approach—the list will help us focus on what we really need to
get done so that the other stuff doesn't distract. But your brain hangs onto
those distractions and if you don’t get them all down on paper, you very well
may be setting yourself up for derailment.
David
Allen, author of Getting
Things Done,
known to many simply as GTD, says the first step in
making an effective list is to capture everything—that's 100% of what is
competing for your attention—so that it's all in one place. Once you've got it
all down, you can then sort through your list and break it into categories,
getting rid of what you can't do anything about, breaking what you can do into
actionable steps, and filing what you don't need to do as urgently in a
reference list for later.
Every
to-do list has those perennial repeats—the things we want to do, intend to do,
but never actually get done. The reason for this, of course, is we simply don't
know where to start.
If
you have something like "do yoga" on your to-do list and you're not
someone who's ever done yoga, you're going to have a much harder time tackling
that task than if you broke it into many simple steps—find yoga studio, sign up
with studio online, buy yoga mat, go to class on Monday at 6 p.m. The tasks you
break your list into might be embarrassingly
simple—"pick
up phone and call yoga studio to ask for class recommendation"—but the
simplest actionable step to get you moving forward should be the first thing on
your list.
Research
in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology has shown that unfinished tasks act as
cognitive distractions that negatively effect your performance overall. In the
study, participants did worse
on a brainstorming task when they were not allowed to finish a simple warm-up
task first. That said, those participants who were allowed to make a plan for finishing
that initial task where freed from the distraction of having not completed it.
The
lesson here: if you can't finish what you started, before moving on, write down
what you have to left to get done in an actionable step on your to-do list. If
the act of figure that out seems like it might take just as long as simply
finishing your task—well, you know what you need to do. Get to it.
By Jane Porter
http://www.fastcompany.com/3040420/why-our-brains-love-lists-and-how-to-make-better-ones?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=01072014
No comments:
Post a Comment