Time Management: How to Manage Your Day With Lists.

If you are like me, your daily schedule is full of responsibilities. You remember to take care of the big ones like going to the office, making it to class or picking up something or someone for dinner. Those types of things take a prominent position in your brain. Your day revolves around those events. It is difficult to forget about them.

There are a number of things that I find get forgotten, put on the back burner or just plain ignored. What do I mean? It’s the little things. It’s the times you put off adding air to your tires for a week knowing they are low, but can’t seem to find the time to stop at a gas station. Sure you could stop at the gas station on the way home from the office, but when you are actually on that drive you are thinking about other things. When you do remember to put air in your tires, you are always in a situation that keeps you from completing that errand at that moment.

There are a lot of examples like this. How many times have you forgotten to take the out trash, or needed something that was buried under a pile of trash in your car. What about the poor cats when you forget to change the litter in their litter box. We forget things all the time.

What are some good ways to remember to do the little stuff that needs to get done?

You could set an alarm (I like to set the one on my cell phone because it is on me nearly all the time) that goes off at a specified time close to when you will be able to do the thing you want to remember. The problem with this one is that you will have to remember why you set the alarm in the first place. If you only set one of these alarms every now and again, remembering what it was for will not be that much of a problem. If you set several alarms everyday, then it may get a little more troublesome. There is a feature on my cell phone that allows me to name a task and set a reminder alarm for that task. This helps me a bit. When I have a number of these alarmed tasks, I have alarms going off all day. These tasks are, in essence, a list.

Lists are great. Keeping a list of to-dos in my phone is great and works as long as I do the chore when the alarm reminds me to. If I dismiss the alarm and don’t do the chore right away, I end up putting it off again and it does not get done. I have to put my mind in the right place. I have to be determined to either do the chore right then, or reset the alarm to remind me when the time is better suited to doing the chore.

Sometimes I actually write out my list on a small sheet of paper. Most of the time I will steal a sheet of paper from the printer or from the recycle paper box. I will fold it into quarters. It fits nicely in my back pocket. Then I write my list on it and scratch off what I have done as I do it. It is a little more tactile. I usually make this hand written list when I am going to be home for the day and know I will have time to get a lot of these chores done. (I have found that if I place that list on the refrigerator, I can easily look at it on a snack or a lunch break. The only problem with that is more chores magically start finding their way onto the list… and not in my own handwriting.)

Lists are great for everything. You should see the one I have for subjects to talk about on this weblog. I must have 30-40 items ready to be expanded upon. That doesn’t include the ‘101 Things You Should do Before You Die‘ list. I also have a list of plot points started for the Novel I am writing. It gives me a direction to go when I am writing.

Do you have any effective habits when it comes to writing your lists and remembering to look at those lists and completing what is on those lists? Take a moment and write a comment. I would love to hear your ways of remembering the little things.