![]() ![]() Usually, things we want to do are high emotional priorities but may be low productivity priorities. Most tasks in life don’t come with such obvious signs of their priorities. Some things are naturally high-priority - if you’re dealing with smoke, fire, blood, a baby crying (or a grownup crying hysterically), you need to tend to that first. We often say, “Well, all things being equal…” but of course, things aren’t equal. The delightfully weird comedian Stephen Wright used to say, “You can’t have everything, where would you put it?” Whether it’s on a sticky note, a page of a legal pad, a digital note in Notes or Evernote or OneNote, or any of a variety of task apps, if it shows the things you need to accomplish, you’re golden. ![]() The simplicity or sophistication of your list of tasks is immaterial. After all, a neurosurgeon doesn’t consult a to-do list to remember all of the steps in a complicated surgery, and we can (usually) handle remembering to make dozens of turns to get from where we work to where we live without benefit of GPS, assuming we’ve driven the route several times. That said, we can certainly remember more things, as long as we don’t have to recite them in very quick sequence. However, a misinterpretation of a famous psychological paper from 1956 leads people to understand Miller’s Law as allowing us to remember 7 things, plus-or-minus two. I always think of it as plus-or-minus three, given that phone numbers in North America being seven digits plus a three-digit area code. Our brains can hold about seven things in our short-term memory, plus-or-minus a few.
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