I am a big fan of lists, both online, and offline. Lists free my mind, and are the nitro boost for my work. Without lists, I would stop functioning efficiently. When I look around and I see all the people who don’t use lists, I wonder how they do without it. Start using lists and you too will wonder how others do without it.

The human brain, it is said, cannot process more than 7 things parallelly. Of course, I read this and forgot about it, until I started using lists, when I realized this is true.

Create lists, lots of lists. Create lists of lists, lists of lists to create, lists of lists to process. Create a list for every idea you have that relates to you work.

Here’s how you start using lists:

1. Keep a list book, a small one that can be on or around you at all times.
2. To start, just use the book to write down thoughts, one per page, as and when they occur to you, that you want to think more about. Don’t worry about organizing the ideas just yet - don’t let that stop you - go on, keep nothing down things as they occur.
3. After you write down the idea, in the same page, write down all related thoughts as a list
4. If you don’t have time to flesh out that thought, create a list of un-fleshed-out thoughts
5. When you start a writing task, or a programming task — any work related task — create a list of lists of things you think of as you are doing the task.
6. After you are done doing what you started to do, go back to the list, and pick the first item, and complete it
7. Iteratively you will complete them all
8. If you did not complete them all, don’t worry — your brain decided that the idea was not worth it - that’s perfectly normal. Writing down an idea and then rejecting it is better than not considering the idea and having a weight on your mind that worries, after you are done with the task, that thinks, “Have I forgotten or overlooked something?”
9. Some list items might deserve a life of their own, and will become lists themselves - encourage this
10. Don’t lose your book of lists, ever!

Writing ideas down like this frees you mind phenomenally. You are free of

1. The nagging suspicion that you overlooked something
2. The pressure to remember to do X, and then Y, and then Z and then …
3. The possibility of losing ideas that might have borne fruit if only you had given it some gestation time
4. The overhead of organizing information without visual feedback
5. The overhead of brain-space to store temporary data while processing the task at hand

In doing what I suggest, the one question you should constantly ask yourself — the talisman if you will — to answer your questions about how, or whether to do something, is, “Will doing this reduce the load on my brain?“. Answer that and you will evolve to a system of lists that is rewarding.