the to... list

One of the parts of David Allen’s getting things done that have really lasted throughout the last few years for me is the concept of lists.

These lists aren’t temporary, although they may eventually disappear, they are lists of interesting things to do, places to go and activities we would like to engage in. We collect these as inspiration and then can refer to them when the time is right.

I call these our ’to….’ Lists, rather than to-do lists. They aren’t tasks, but useful references when, for example, we are looking for inspiration for a rainy weekend - it is Britain so you need to plan for these sorts of things!

Here the lists I use most often:

• to holiday - destinations we would like to explore in the future, both city breaks and summer vacations.

• to do with the kids - the classic ‘rainy day’ list, although they are getting older it won’t be long before this gets retired.

• to do as a grown ups - this list works well for exhibitions, of things we’d like to do that would not be fun for the kids.

• to watch - movies and TV series go in here. We tend to stack them up to watch over the winter then cut our subscriptions to Netflix etc for the summer where sitting out in the evening is a much nicer thing to do. Gets tricky to manage with what is where so experimenting with justwatch.com and a place to keep things all in one place and track new seasons of ur favourites.

• to sell - things we spot that will be going on eBay or Facebook marketplace the next time it is time for a purge - this is a classic rainy Saturday afternoon activity.

• to gift - organised by individual, inspiration for gifts we might have seen, or they have mentioned. Really handy for birthdays and Christmas.

• to read - the book list I will never get round to 🤣

What lists would be useful for you to keep? Which ones of the above would you use, or are there ones you use that I might integrate into my collection?