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Growing up my mother had drilled into me the concept of checklists. She always had a large list on a piece of paper, she would also leave my sister and I chore lists. Every time we left the house she would always stop at the threshold of the door and say “do your mental checklist”. At the time it drove me nuts, but to this day whenever I walk out of the house “keys.. wallet… phone..,” and when I leave the car “keys in my hand.. lock the door..”

Lists became natural to me in high school when I would write a step by step list of the homework and chores I would do in the most efficient order, as well as what downloads to start and in what order so when everything was done, I could spend as much time as possible playing Quake, or working on some code.

At the heart of any sort of life hacking or “getting things done” workflow are these same original lists I’ve had drilled into my head since I was a child. What I’ve found though is that these lists are very restricting in that they take extra thought from your brain to extrapolate the context. I am more then likely already spouting off direct lines from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” but part of me refuses to spend time reading about about how to get things done (oddly this same part is okay with writing about it.).

Context is as simple as a grocery list. If I make a list of all my days errands, add on all the days chores, then add on dependent items that can only be done at certain times of the day or while something else is happening I end up with quite the list. Things get lost in the shuffle. I go out to the grocery store and I have to constantly waste thought processes weeding out the items on the list which are out of context. Things.app has solved this for me. A simple Mac OS X desktop application with iPhone companion application, Things.app allows me to tag all of my items with their appripriate context.

When traveling to the grocery store, doing my chores, or slogging thru code I am no longer thinking about the other items to do in their respective contexts. I’ve trained my brain to turn off repeating these lists over in my head. In these spare brain cycles I think of things to write, come up with new application ideas, solve coding problems. In effect thru relational and structured thinking I’ve freed up my brain to be more creative.

This all ties ultimately into the length of my beard though as any good todo list system should. Recently I have decided to start putting menial tasks into my lists as repeating tasks. Shaving is one of those tasks that I always know I need to do it, but put it off until it bothers me so much I stop what I am doing, break concentration and shave. So I picked a timeframe. I won’t shave or think about shaving until every second Tuesday. A task appears in my lists now under the Personal / Home / Hygiene contexts every second Tuesday. This time frame is short enough to not get frustrated with the length of my beard and long enough to not be annoying and time wasting.

My new shaving method can be applied to all of the most menial tasks around the home. I now think of these repeating tasks like the video game The Sims. If I want to put more energy into my work, I increase the length between times of certain household tasks.

I know this is all a “duh!” notion but putting it down on paper and using tools to plot out how I want to spend my time has instantly improved my productivity and has helped me put time and effort in the activities I love.