Do You Ever Use Your To-Do List?

Everyone has a to-do list, it’s quite easy to write everything out but do we actually follow the list?

Richard Branson shared his thoughts about to-do lists, and how much ignoring our own advice can affect our productivity.

This year has truly flown by – it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was at Verbier with the family over Christmas talking about our New Years’ resolutions and how I wanted to get unbelievably fit so I’m ready for a trip into space.

I’ve always made lists of things I want to achieve – it helps me track my progress. But to-do lists are only useful if you actually do the things on your list. So I made a note on my New Years’ resolution to check in every three months and make sure I was making strides towards achieving it.

The act of writing your tasks and thoughts down is useful as it helps to make sense of your ideas and give you focus.

However, if you then ignore your own advice and don’t follow up, the lists will lose most of their power. Quite often you will only do 50 percent of things on to-do lists because, on reflection, only 50 percent are worth doing.

But by putting things on lists it will help clarify what’s worth doing and what’s worth dropping.

I’m happy to report that I successfully completed the Virgin Strive Challenge – we hiked, biked and cycled nearly 2,000km across Europe, finishing by climbing Mont Blanc. It was the most grueling 33 days I’ve ever experienced but I’m the fittest I’ve been in years and am miraculously injury-free at the end of it (despite falling over on slippery rocks and dodging a rockfall!).

I feel so fit right now I think I could probably take on a 25-year-old me in a race and win!

The challenge now for the next few months is to keep my fitness up – I’ll be doing lots of kitesurfing and playing tennis as Necker Island is reopening after recovering from Hurricane Irma.

Virgin Galactic is getting tantalizing closer and closer to space – so I better keep pushing those pedals to make sure I’m ready for my trip (there couldn’t be any better fitness motivation than that!).

What are your tips to keep yourself motivated towards achieving your goals?