No More (ToDo) Lists

- rtfm alpha-century

When I start to use “5-4-3-2-1” method, by setting five years goals, I noticed, that bullet list suck. There is a three major reason not to use it: no priority information, no relation information, no background information.

When you set your five years goals, you don’t want bullet list with nouns. What you want instead is the information why this goal, how important this goal is (at least at the time of setting goals or following reviews), what was the context about this particular goal, how this goal is related and connected to other goals.

This is where plain text came to help you.

Write down in simple plain text what is your goal, if it related or connected to other goals — write it down. That way you will preserve a lot of viable information.

Why this is so important? Because latter on durring following review you will be able to easyly understood what each goal mean and how it’s related to others. Create better understanding with your future self.

Taking such an approach out of five years goals you will see that creating better understanding is possible not only between you and future self, but also between you and your colleagues and partners.

As it came out after a little bit of a research on the internet — a lot of people already stoped using bullet lists and even powerpoint presentations.

The most notable is probably Jeffrey Bezos with his letter to shareholders and following discussion on the internet.

Here is a cite from this letter.

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

(c) From the letter to shareholders by Jeffrey Bezos.