10 Benefits/Importance of an Effective To-Do List
A to-do list has numerous importance and benefits that can help you accomplish your daily tasks and goals. A to-do list is one good way to get started in correcting your habits and help you be on top of your game with all your tasks, work and other activities.
On my last article, I talked about ways to write an effective to-do list. Now, we’ll be talking about the important aspects and the benefits of writing a to-do list.
The following are ways a to-do list can benefit you in accomplishing your daily goals.
1. Helps You Focus on a Particular Task at a Time: Writing a to-do list can help you track your daily tasks, activities & record your accomplishments in a given day. It also helps you know and prioritize urgent and important tasks that may need immediate attention. It helps you to prioritize and stay focused on the goals you need to achieve daily.
2. Keeps you organized: I carried out a survey one time ago about how individuals manage and complete their tasks, and it showed that individuals, employees and students who write down their tasks, goals or things they need to do and follow a plan for it are more productive than those who store it up in their memory because they’ll easily forget. Having a written to-do list of your daily plan and goals will help you stay more organized, focused and reduce the stress of having to think the next thing you were planning to do since you have them all written down. A To-do list can help you take control of your day, time, it keeps you in check and helps you maintain a clear focus on what you wish to achieve.
3. Increases your productivity: When you start your day with a plan in place and a clarification of what you need to do, it makes each day count for you, as there are no days you wouldn’t be accomplishing anything. A to-do list helps you to structure and take control of your daily activities. It’s better to start your day knowing what you want to do or accomplish than not knowing and rather trying to figure out or remember what you want to do. With a to-do list, you can prioritize your tasks by knowing the most urgent and pressing task, important and hardest task or the less important task you need to carry out.
4. Relieve stress, anxiety and tension: A do-list is one of the biggest stress relievers that I know of. It helps you achieve more than just your goals. Knowing your next task can help you plan better; you know if you want to want to do the tasks or assign it to someone else in order to meet up with the deadline. The feeling of knowing what to do next and when to do it, relieves stress since you have less things to worry about. Completing your tasks at the appropriate time, reduces need for worry and keeps you confident and satisfied. The feeling of completing a task successfully, releases a substance called dopamine to your brain, which has the ability to make you feel better and happy.
5. Helps you stay accountable: Most people overlook the need for noting down things with a pen and a notebook probably because of technology devices in place but I’ll still say that nothing beats the magic that comes with writing with a pen and a paper. The need for writing things down is highly important and its effect cannot be replaced. Writing a to-do list is a powerful tool that can help us stay accountable to ourselves.
6. Helps you practice good time management: With a to-do list, you realize that after accomplishing your tasks or goals, you feel relived and now have enough time to do other things for yourself. It helps you maximize good use of your time & dedicate to your tasks. Seeing a list of the things you need to do gives you that drive and energy that makes you want to accomplish them. After completing each task on the list, you know what’s next and can easily move to the next task on your to-do list. When you finish your tasks efficiently and effectively, you can gain more free time for yourself to relax and do other things you enjoy
7. Serves as a memory aid: Writing a to-do list will help you improve your short-term memory to easily remember things and reduces brain drain. To-do lists also helps you know what task you’ve achieved or completed. It helps you to get rid of procrastination while serving as a memory aid to help you remember your task and avoid procrastination. Since your task is already written down, you can always remember things by checking for information on your to-do list whenever you need.
8. Gives you a sense of accomplishment: It’s no doubt that when we accomplish any specific task, it boosts our moral and confidence thereby giving us a sense of accomplishment. Writing “done” or ticking a “check mark” in your to-do list box gives you a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.
9. Makes tasks and goals achievable: a to-do list makes it easy for you to achieve whatever tasks or goals you’ve set up for yourself or written. It serves as a constant reminder for tasks that you’re yet to do. It’s hard to write a proper to do list and get noting done. With a to-do list you can easily complete, mark your tasks and move over to the next task and by so doing, accomplishing your tasks will become very easy for you to do.
10. Help you stay mentally active. As you may know, our brains are not meant to hold information for too long, that’s why we are prone to forget things. With a to-do list, you can get a constant reminder for your tasks and can also check your to-do list any task that you are yet to accomplish.