Transcription
Most productivity advice is completely backwards, and I have the peer-reviewed data to prove it. I've gone through 60 studies on task completion, procrastination, and goal pursuit. And today, I'm ranking every major to-do list strategy from S tier to F tier. Let's see what productivity YouTube gets right, and what's just recycled productivity lore and one common piece of advice actually increases procrastination. We're covering everything from time blocking to implementation intentions. And by the end of this video, you'll know exactly which strategies are worth your time and which ones research says you should drop immediately.
And if we've never met before, hi, my name is Dr. Jamie. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist who focuses on calm, organized, and sustainable productivity without sacrificing your mental health. I study high performance for a living, so you know that there'll be references down below. Let's get into it.
Let's start with the ever popular >> brain dump. Brain dump. >> Brain dump. >> Brain dump. >> Brain dump. >> It's okay. You do not have to call it that. >> The brain dump. A brain dump is a complete list of all of the things that you have to do. And it's called that because you're dumping out the contents of your brain onto a piece of paper, an app, or a device. So, you're trying to get out all of those to-do list items. Psychologists think it works by reducing cognitive load. Instead of holding all those things in your brain, you're offloading them to some sort of external device. And cognitive offloading does have some scientific backing, especially when it's something that you're going to do immediately. There's lots of research out there on the importance of writing things down and how you're not depending on your brain to hold on to the information. So, the research suggests that to-do lists are awesome when you're going to immediately act on those things. If you want to write a quick to-do list of the areas of the house that you have to pick up or write a quick grocery list and then take that grocery list and actually shop for those groceries right away. It is excellent for that. We also know that these to-do lists are awesome when you're trying to standardize a process. Those are known as checklists. And if you want to decrease variability between how you do something and how someone else does something, externalizing that into a checklist is really effective.
But the reason psychologists love cognitive offloading is because you don't have to hold that information in your head anymore. And that's one of the issues that we have with writing these kind of brain dump to-do lists. Brain dumps could actually weaken your later memory for the task because your brain isn't worried about holding on to it anymore. It is now externalized to the paper, the device, or whatever you're using. This is especially true if you don't have some sort of review system or some sort of standardized way of engaging with this list on a regular basis. One long list of everything that you have to do is unlikely to be effective at helping you get everything done.
When I was doing the research in brain dumps, I did find one kind of random benefit. A study randomly assigned people to one of two conditions. Either 5 minutes of writing what you have done in the day, so kind of your conventional journaling. And the other group was asked to take 5 minutes to write down all of the things that they needed to do the next day. Although the study didn't look at differences in completion rates, they did find an unexpected benefit. On average, the group that did the brain dump went to sleep 9 minutes faster. And the more specific the brain dump, the faster they fell asleep. The researchers noted that this difference was comparable to pharmaceutical sleep aids. Well, they're better than nothing for cognitive offloading. They're good for immediate actions. They're bad for long-term remembering, and there might be some additional benefits for sleep. Since this rating system is focusing on how well it gets you to actually complete your to-do list, the brain dump is going to be squarely in the C tier.
I am genuinely surprised at how many high achievers still swear by multitasking. Maybe it's the modern workplace, or honestly, maybe it's just modern life, but it feels like you're required to constantly be multitasking. But I cannot find one single study, not one, where multitasking improved your ability to get things done. It was quite the opposite. Multitasking decreased time to completion, decreased accuracy, decreased memory retention. These findings were consistent across a variety of different studies. In behavioral science labs, when participants were asked to perform multiple tasks at the same time versus sequentially, the multitaskers performed worse every time. We see multitasking come up even when we're not trying to do it. In offices, it'll come up as like someone asking you if you have a second, an email popping up, or those pesky Slack notifications. These interruptions impact quality, productivity, and working memory. It doesn't work at work, and it doesn't work as a strategy to effectively get through your to-do list. Multitasking, straight F tier.
While we're here, let's go ahead and examine the cousin of multitasking, and that's monotasking. Now, monotasking as a process, let's go ahead and dump it into A tier. And I'm going to tell you why in just a second. I'm dropping it off already because the same science that tells us that multitasking sucks tells us why or gives us a little bit of information on the benefits of monotasking. Monotasking is singular dedicated focus to one task at a time. And as you can imagine, it's flipped in the science where the studies show that monotasking increases performance, decreases completion time, and also increases accuracy and focus. That's why it earns its spot up on our A tier.
One of the reasons psychologists think that monotasking improves task completion is because it increases the likelihood that we'll get into this psychological state called flow. A flow state is a subject of experience where people feel like task completion feels automatic, intrinsically rewarding, optimal, and almost effortless. Some people report losing track of time and feeling like they're just seamlessly moving through their to-do list. Now, evidence supports here that getting into this flow state improves task performance. However, there's very little research on whether or not getting into the flow state actually increases the amount of completed tasks. So, if we were rating strategies based on how well you perform the tasks, the flow state would go into our A tier. But since we're looking at strategies on how well they help us get through all of the individual items in our to-do list, the flow state ends up in the B tier. Even though I'm moving this into the B tier, keep this research in mind when we come back to time blocking.
Have you ever heard that some people are morning people and some people are night people? Well, maybe the best way to get through your to-do list is to match your tasks with your chronoype. Does it make a difference if you put your hardest tasks during your peak work hours? Well, evidence does show that aligning your most demanding, effortful tasks with your optimum time of day can improve your accuracy, your speed, and your sustained cognitive control. Fancy words of saying your focus. This is especially true as we get older. But here's a case where we have almost no information on whether or not it helps you get more things done. If you focus on doing your to-do list during your specific peak hours, the support for energy matching is mainly about performance and stability of effort, not actual numbers of things that you can knock out. That's why energy matching is going to end up right next to flow state on our B tier.
Let's go to one of my favorite strategy. A strategy that takes into account urgency, due dates, and prioritization. If you guessed the Eisenhower decision matrix, you'd be right. The Eisenhower decision matrix or prioritization matrix is a framework that helps you prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. It basically helps you determine what you're going to do first, second, and third. Now, I was surprised to learn that even though research on the Eisenhower matrix is growing, there's not too much out there on whether or not it helps you get more things done. There was one study done by a tech consulting company where they found that using the Eisenhower decision matrix as part of a larger work organization kind of support program found that there was a 20% reduction in average project completion time and fewer overdue tasks. There were also several other studies that looked at the general use of a prioritization matrix. One was a published study looking at medical students using a similar time management matrix and they found that it significantly increase self-rated time management and prioritization confidence, but they didn't measure actual task completion. There was another diary study looking at 878 tasks across 29 engineers and they found that tasks that were labeled as having high priority and high urgency were the most likely tasks to be completed. And this finding held above and beyond just general planning. If we stretch out a little bit and we look into other areas of research, we'll see that some of the same studies that looked at multitasking also found that when individual tasks were rated or prioritized in some way, that actually increased the likelihood that you were going to do those tasks. They found that when people were clearly instructed on which tasks took priority or when they themselves labeled something as being higher priority that increased the likelihood that that task was going to be completed. And even studies in neuroscience show that when we've identified or labeled a task as being high priority, participants tend to perform better at that task. So there's really strong conceptual support but not a lot of direct evidence. And this is something that we're going to see over and over throughout this video. There could be some conceptual scientific support, but not a lot of randomized control trials, specifically looking at the to-do list strategy. Given the scientific evidence, I wish that I could give the Eisenhower decision matrix an A minus. But when I look at it compared to some of these other concepts, it actually ends up here in the A tier because the research that we reviewed talks about task completion, not just task performance or subjective feelings. It actually measured how many individual items you got done in your to-do list, how quickly those things got done and how many things were late. So based on that and my personal preference, the Eisenhower decision matrix is going to end up in the A tier.
If you disagree with that ranking, I want to know about it. Leave a comment in the comment section down below. How does the evidence compare to some of the other things like chronotyping or multitasking? And while you're down there, if you're getting any value from this video, consider subscribing to this channel.
All right, remember at the top of the video when I told you one of these strategies actually increases procrastination? Well, I'm part of the problem here. The next strategy we're going to examine is doing your easy tasks first. And in my defense, there is actually strong evidence to support the psychological concept of self-efficacy. And some people think that if we get some quick, easy wins under our belt, that's going to increase the likelihood that I'm going to do more things. In the productivity realm, if you start with the easy stuff, the theory here is that you start to build momentum. And once you get some wins under your belt, you can ride that energy wave on to completing harder and harder tasks. I hear this from clients all the time, and it makes intuitive sense, and it's even consistent with some of the strategies and techniques that I teach here on this channel. But what does the science actually say about how useful this is at actually helping you get through your to-do list? In a study performed in hospitals, scientists found that as the number of tasks increases, people showed a stronger preference for choosing easier tasks for completion. That's something that we could experience in our lives, especially if we're trying to manage long to-do list. We might have the propensity to pick things that are easy to accomplish. And here's the thing, it actually does work in the short run. These studies show that when you pull out easy things from your task list, you actually increase the amount of tasks that you complete in the short run. But overall, it tends to decrease the number of tasks that you complete in aggregate. It also decreases your speed and productivity. So if you use this strategy, you run the risk of feeling like you're getting things done, but maybe it's just not the right things. And across the span of your day and your week, you're actually getting less things done. Now, I want to be fair here because this topic is complicated and these studies don't control for all variables. It doesn't account for things like deadlines. Maybe the easy things are also the things that are due before lunch. But we see a pretty clear pattern in this research. Defaulting to easy tasks becomes a sort of sophisticated form of procrastination. You're busy. You're checking things off, but you're quietly avoiding things that you have to do. So, easy task first ends up here on the C list. It is going to appear to increase task completion, but overall it decreases task completion. And there's also an impact on efficiency and effectiveness because you could be doing the wrong thing.
Which brings us to the direct opposite. Have you ever heard of the phrase eat the frog? Well, Brian Tracy wrote a whole book on it, and I see it all over productivity YouTube. But what does the science actually say about doing the hardest thing first? A 2025 two-part study published in the Journal of Personal Psychology found that when people start their day with their most difficult tasks, then move on to easier work. A few things happen. They report less fatigue by the end of the day, they feel more mentally relaxed at work, and they even perform better on what we call extra role behaviors. That's things like helping others or going above and beyond your job description at work. So here the science supports that it helps you get more things done and actually change the way that you feel as you're doing things throughout your day. But I am a psychologist and I'm not afraid to talk about feelings. Studies show that when you do the hardest thing first, you actually subjectively feel like they're less difficult. And objective measures of overall performance also increase. If we're still looking at this from the lens of self-efficacy, this also makes sense. If you take on a difficult task and you succeed, it's likely to increase your belief that you're going to be successful at your less difficult tasks. This decreases the amount of energy and effort it takes for you to start off on the next task, and it increase your feeling like you'll be able to successfully follow through. All of those contribute to your ability to get more things done. That means that eating the frog earned its space here up on the A tier. The only thing preventing eating the frog from moving up into the S tier is the number of research studies. This is still an emerging area of behavioral science. So I imagine over time this might move up into the S tier, but a lot of the studies that we have have been completed over the last few years and still require consistent replication over time.
Staying in my psychology lane, I wonder if there's another strategy for getting through your to-do list that also has secondary psychological benefits. There is both a performance and a mental health benefit to examining how close your tasks align with your values. In psychology, we call this self- concordant goals or self- concordant tasks. and that's how many entries in your task list are actually consistent with what's important to you or what's important in this season of your life. Research in this area consistently show that there's better progress, persistence, and completion rates when you're doing valued aligned tasks. This is especially true when the individual tasks align with larger goals. Part of the reason this works is the super practical fact that if you only have things on your to-do list that are lining up with your value system or lining up with what's important to you, we're naturally going to cut some things out of our list. And I hear this all the time on my channel and in my individual work with clients. I have 365 different things on my task list. How is putting them into a prioritization matrix going to help me get anything done? Well, one of the answers is helping you to cut out things that don't necessarily belong on your to-do list. When you're focusing on doing things that are aligned with your values or aligned with what you feel is important or what interests you, you're going to naturally have a smaller list. Focus on what's important to you and maybe let the car wash fall off of your list. Now maybe just because we have had decades of research on the importance of aligning your behavior with your values, but there is a ton of research in this area and that research has been replicated over and over again. Which is why critically examining your to-do list, dropping off the things that are not consistent with your current season of life, and looking at your to-do list and figuring out how to have a values aligned to-do list is going to end up here in the A team.
Let's move on to talk about a favorite among the Getting Things Done crowd. Getting Things Done is a famous productivity book written by David Allen. I highly recommend it. One of the things that it talks about is having contextspecific task lists. This is a way of organizing your tasks based on the situation, the environment, or the resources required to complete them. So, you choose tasks to match with where you are and what you have available. Think lists for when you're running errands, things that you can handle in the car while you're waiting for your son to get out of track practice after school, or things that you can do while you're waiting on a line. Now, much of this research focuses on microtasks. There are the little tasks that you can do in these pockets of time. One study examined what people are actually doing in these micro breaks. And they found that 60% of people use this time on leisure activities, things like scrolling on social media, while 20% of the time was spent on productive activities and 20% of the time was spent on maintenance activities. Giving credit where credit is due, the tech space was the first ones to start to look into how we can optimize some of these micro moments, especially in the early 2000s when we were looking at fancy things like having location specific reminders. As far back as 20 years ago, they were looking into how to do this and were even trying to examine whether or not they could pull out what task lists in a digital task list were microtasks or good potential contenders for things that they could remind you to do in specific locations. I'll leave that particular study down below. I especially like to read older tech journals because it's interesting to see what they thought might happen in the future and then to see how many of those things we actually have today. Now, context specific lists have super high potential because we know from the general behavioral science literature that when you can attach a cue to a specific response, in this case, a location potentially giving you a reminder to actually do the task that the likelihood that you're going to do that task actually increases. So, there's great potential there. But there's just not enough studies here from the tech world or from psychology realm on whether or not separating your to-do list like this actually increases the amount of things that you get done. So, for now, contextspecific to-do lists are going to end up in the C tier, but I imagine that as we start collecting additional information, or if we start doing more studies on this strategy, I bet that it'll go up to B or even A tier, as we start gathering up some of the evidence. It's just not there yet.
All right, let's go into the more niche strategies. Let's examine this selection of your top three tasks and how selecting your top three increases or decreases how many to-do list items you actually complete. I was surprised when I actually found a research study that looked at just this strategy, identifying your top three tasks for the day and how that impacted productivity. It was a 4-week field study with a pretty small sample size, so 35 knowledge workers. They tested out a specific task management tool. The tool asked individuals to identify their top three tasks for the day. It also kept those three tasks visible at all times through a small widget and the program included an end of the day reflection. All of these things are right up my alley. The result was actually increased task completion rates, increased focus and motivation, and a positive shift in how people perceived their own work. So here we have that increased subjective feelings of well-being or feelings like they're being effective at work. Beyond testing the specific strategy of looking at your top three, we do have some supporting surrounding research here, the research we already reviewed on prioritization and how that is helpful in terms of increasing the likelihood that you'll actually do that behavior and increasing the likelihood that you'll get through more things in the day. but just that one study on identifying the top three specifically. Since we have one study directly testing the strategy and we have supporting literature on the underlying concept and theoretical grounding, I'm going to put the top three up in the B tier.
Now, we're getting into some strategies with some serious scientific muscle behind them. Let's talk about the strategy with the fanciest title, implementation intentions. A massive metaanalysis that is a study of studies looked at 94 different studies to understand the impact of implementation intentions on whether or not people actually completed items on their to-do list. The findings were clear study after study. When you identify how you're actually going to complete a task, you vastly increase the likelihood that you're going to complete the thing. That is what we mean by implementation intention. This means planning out things like when you're going to do the task, where you're going to do the task, and how you're going to do the task. The more specific, the better. Science shows that this kind of planning increases completion rates, increases the likelihood that you'll remember the task, and works for both hard and easy things on your to-do list. So, implementation intention has the highest S tier rating here. High quality science repeated across multiple populations, repeated across multiple studies throughout several decades of research, works in different contexts for different task types, all the way up in the S tier.
Next, let's talk about the highly polarizing time blocking. Time blocking is sometimes called time boxing, and this makes sense when there is an inconsistency in how people define what we mean by time blocking. Most people define time blocking as a time management technique where you divide your time into predefined blocks and you assign each block to a specific activity or type of work. That's actually really different than how I define time blocking where I match a specific task to a specific date and time on my calendar. That slight difference vastly increases or decreases the amount of scientific support we have for that strategy. Let's focus on what both of these definitions have in common and three lines of behavioral science that are consistent with the value of doing some sort of time blocking. First, time blocking is a form of implementation intention. Either you are intending to stay focused on a group of tasks or you're intending on staying focused on a particular task at a specific date and time. Either way, we know that there is solid scientific evidence on how helpful it is to have these types of implementation intentions. Secondly, time blocking keeps you focused on one thing at a time. It's either one specific task or one kind of list subgroup of tasks. Either way, even though it's to a different degree, you're decreasing the cost of task switching. A group of studies from Stanford shows that there is up to a 40% decrease in productivity when you're switching from task to task. Research by Dr. Gloria Mark over at UC Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to a task after you've interrupted yourself or you're moving from one thing to another. That's 23 minutes every single time. There's also the psychological concept of attentional residue where moving from one task to another means that you're still kind of thinking about the task that you were just doing. So it takes you a little bit of time before you're fully engaged in the new task. And if you're going back and forth back and forth, there is kind of that attentional residue like stickiness that just stays with you and never lets you fully focus on the task at hand. If you can't do that, it's probably hard for you to get into that flow state that we talked about earlier. So to differing degrees, these two concepts of time blocking help you have a single focus which also has its particular productivity benefits. This is why I have created two icons for time blocking. If you're using the general definition and you're identifying blocks of time where you're going to be engaging in a specific type of task or type of activity, that still has a decent amount of scientific evidence. And I'm moving that up to the A tier. If you're doing time blocking, kind of how I recommend it, where you're actually taking your individual tasks and plugging them into a specific date and time in your calendar, that's actually bringing it up to an implementation intention. So, it's a type of implementation intention, and that goes up to the S tier.
Now, what does this little guy working out have to do with to-do list strategies? Well, the next strategy is a subject of hundreds, probably thousands of videos here on YouTube, and that is turning individual items on your to-do list into habits. From a psychological perspective, habits are learned automatic behaviors that are triggered by cues in your environment. Because a behavior has been repeated so many times, it becomes efficient and Q-driven rather than effortful or deliberate. Now, if you're able to be super consistent with your tasks, or if you have multiple items on your to-do list that come up over and over again, it is super helpful if you could work to move those items over into habits. There's a few reasons habits help you get through your to-do list. One of them we've talked about, which is context specific queuing. Sometimes if you're just in a specific situation that cues you and elicits the specific tasks that you need to do in that context, but also from a practical level, the more things become habitualized, hopefully the less items need to go on your to-do list. Less items also increases the likelihood that you'll get to the end of the list. If we're looking at it purely from the perspective of actually checking things off when something is a habit, we are more likely to do it even in the face of distraction, time pressure, and low or no willpower. Habitualizing your tasks up in the S tier.
And that's the ball game. If you've been with me the entire time, you are my kind of nerdy people. Please leave a blue heart in the comment section down below just know that you're here. you made it all the way to the end. I definitely want to say hi to you, get to know you a little better. You'll notice this little checklist down here, and that is because I want to remind you that regardless of what strategy or technique you use, it is always helpful to externalize what is going on in your head. If you're looking for a place to start, even starting off with some of our C-tier strategies and getting things out of your head and onto a piece of paper, an app, externalizing and decreasing some of that cognitive load could be a helpful starting point. So, there you have it. We've moved from F tier to S tier, and you know all about what the peerreview data says about moving through your to-do list. If there's a strategy I missed, I'd love to hear it. I love doing these nerdy deep dives. Also, let me know what surprised you the most on this list and maybe what strategy you use to tackle your to-do list. And if this is the kind of video you'd like, you might want to check out one of my other nerdy deep dives right here.