Try the approach offered by occupational therapy.

It seems obvious that it's important to write down all tasks to avoid missing anything, accomplish more, and better assess your capabilities. Additionally, it helps to avoid the quite painful Zeigarnik effect, which makes us unable to get unfinished tasks out of our heads and we keep mentally returning to them over and over again.

How to Rewrite Your To-Do List to Worry Less and Achieve More

However, overly long and chaotic to-do lists can sometimes do more harm than good. They induce panic, cause anxiety, create stress, and ruin your mood.

Occupational therapy helps people cope with various illnesses and challenges through hobbies, work, and other daily activities. It can offer a couple of methods to organize your to-do list and make it more comfortable for our mental health. Here are a few simple steps to help you achieve this.

1. Divide Tasks into Categories

In occupational therapy, there are three main categories of tasks:

  • Productivity. This includes tasks related to learning, work, and childcare.
  • Self-Care. This refers not only to face masks, baths, and massages, although those are included too. Self-care is viewed in a broad sense and includes cooking, shopping for clothes, cleaning, hygiene, doctor visits, and exercising.
  • Leisure. This encompasses anything that helps you relax, recharge, and experience new things or change your environment, from reading a book and crafting to hiking.

There's nothing stopping you from creating your own categories, such as "Learning," "Work," "Parenting," "Self-Development" - just make sure there aren't too many, ideally no more than five.

2. Assess Your Balance

Once you've established your categories, take a look at your task list and label which category they belong to. Some tasks may fit into two categories at once. For example, is a visit to the cosmetologist for a facial massage relaxation or self-care? In such cases, feel free to assign the task to whichever group you prefer.

Then count how many tasks fall into each group. If the number of tasks in all categories is roughly equal, that's great. But if you constantly feel stressed, exhausted, and can't seem to tackle your accumulated tasks, you're likely to find a serious imbalance in your list.

For instance, you might be working too much and hardly resting. Or you may be taking care of others but neglecting yourself. Perhaps you're dedicating too little time to your hobbies and personal projects.

This imbalance negatively affects your emotional state. A study conducted in Sweden showed that disruptions in employment balance lead to various stress-related disorders.

3. Create a New List

Occupational therapist Sarah Bens offers the following recommendations:

  • Immediately categorize tasks and try to ensure that each category has roughly the same number of tasks. If there are 15 tasks in the "Productivity" section, there shouldn't be just two in the "Leisure" section.
  • Don't overdo it and avoid trying to plan too many tasks, as this pile can demotivate you. For example, you might aim for 10 tasks in each category per week.
  • Complete tasks evenly. Try to tackle tasks from all categories each day. If you work non-stop from Monday to Friday, clean on Saturday, run errands, and only do yoga, read, and do a face mask on Sunday evening, your balance will still be disrupted.
  • Be sensible and caring towards yourself. Don't take on too much and remember that the better you care for yourself, the more you can accomplish.