In order to work effectively, your to-do list’s mini-goals also need to be well defined and have short time frames. With the uncertainty of the coronavirus crisis and the difficulty of making concrete plans, he said it could make sense to have your initial plan be simply to make a plan at a later date. “Something that’s been sitting there for too long is probably just stated in too big terms.”
“To-do lists often tend to be mental graveyards, but that said I think there’s some relief there,” Masicampo said, adding that sub-goals are important. “We were able to find that you don’t have to finish the goal to offload it – you really could just make a specific plan for how to attain it to get it to stop occupying that mental space,” Masicampo said.īut Masicampo cautioned that it won’t help to offload your mental burden by jotting it down on a list “without actually making a plan.” People with unfinished short-term goals performed poorly on unrelated reading and comprehension tasks, reported a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Masicampo and research co-author Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at The University of Queensland.īut when the 2011 study participants were allowed to formulate specific plans for their goals before moving onto the next task, those negative effects were eliminated. “It can be omnipresent whether you’re aware of it or not.”
“When a goal is unfinished it might be a weight on your mind in terms of anxiety or worry and it colors how you see the world, because it’s sort of tugging at the sleeve of your conscious attention,” Masicampo said. Masicampo, an associate professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Goals are interesting as they are almost these autonomous agents that kind of live inside you and occupy space in your mind,” said E.J. But simply making a plan to facilitate that goal, such as detailing steps on a to-do list, can help your mind set it aside to focus on other things. Research on the psychology of goal-making has revealed that an unfinished goal causes interference with other tasks you’re trying to achieve. The trick is to reframe your to-do list as a set of miniature goals for the day and to think of your checklist items as steps in a plan. To-do lists can be great tools for decreasing anxiety, providing structure and giving us a record of everything we’ve accomplished in a day. In a time when it seems like we may have less to do, a to-do list actually could be quite helpful.Īs the days blend together for many people living in lockdown, crossing things off a to-do list can feel even more satisfying.
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