I currently have 66 items on my to do list. Nine of them are personal, and the rest are work-related. I need to have a system for keeping my to do list in check, otherwise I will lose my mind. I have tried many different solutions in the past, and I am always on the lookout for new ones.

Here is what I am doing now:

I have a dedicated email account for my to dos. I set up a free Gmail for this purpose. I don’t give out the address to anyone so there is nothing in that account except for emails from me to me.

When a new task comes up in my life, I send an email to my TO DO account with the subject being the thing I have to do, such as “Get shoes repaired”. When the email arrives in the TO DO account, I apply a coloured label to it so I can see at glance whether it is personal, work-related, or other.

When I complete the task, I mark it read, add a label called “done”, and archive it.

I have the following labels:

/
don’t do
done
pending

*
personal
work
[two other labels related to groups that I volunteer with]

+
maybe read
maybe think about
maybe watch

The symbols (/, *, +) are used to separate out these three sections. So the label “/” has three sublabels: don’t do, done, pending).

The don’t do label is important because sometimes you think you need to do something, but you realize later that you don’t. I don’t like to delete those things because I might change my mind again, so I just label them “don’t do”, which is kind of satisfying.

You know how you get a million things sent to you, like newsletters and recordings of webinars that you missed, and there is never enough time to process them? The + section (maybe read, maybe think about, maybe watch) is where these get forwarded. Note that I do not use my TO DO email account to sign up for any newsletters or anything else. It is important to keep this email account PRISTINE and fully under my own control. But, if I receive something that I think is interesting or important and I want to remind myself to maybe read it, watch it, or think about it later, I forward it to the TO DO email account. The “maybe” part affords me the grace to decide whether or not to engage with it so I don’t think of it as a separate thing that I am obligated to do. I have enough obligations already.

This + section also lets me archive things in my other inboxes so they don’t hang around and cause me unneeded stress.

I have a tendency to over-think and over-complicate things, so one big advantage of using this TO DO email system is that there are limited features, so it helps me keep it simple. There are other systems that offer a lot more flexibility, but that flexibility is dangerous for someone like me. I need clear boundaries so I don’t waste my own time.

This method captures my to-dos and doesn’t let me endlessly try to optimize the order they are in, or sort them into different categories, or make them into Eisenhower matrices. There are no other features to distract myself from what I need to focus on when I see this list, which is to answer the question: What is the next right thing to do right now?