Chapter 06

Lists

Not everything you need to remember deserves a place in your week. Lists hold the rest — errands, books, ideas — close at hand and out of the way.

The method is strict about the week: role work, chosen on Monday, in believable amounts. Lists are the release valve that makes that strictness liveable. The MOT reminder, the book a friend mentioned, present ideas collected in March for a birthday in June — none of it is a role, none of it belongs on the plan, and all of it needs to go somewhere the moment it occurs to you.

The W52 Lists screen showing a Household checklist with tagged items — errand, calls, weekend — two of them scheduled onto specific days, alongside reference lists for books and present ideas. — Fig. 6 — A Household checklist with tags, two items dated onto the week, and reference lists waiting behind it.

Two kinds of list

Checklists are for things that get done — household jobs, packing, errands. Items tick off and fall away.
Reference lists are for things that get kept — books to read, restaurants to try, present ideas. No checkboxes, no pressure, just a tidy shelf.

Tags, dates and repeats

Each list has its own small palette of tags — errand, calls, weekend — for slicing a long list by the mood or the moment (“what can I knock out while I’m in town?”). Give an item a date and it surfaces on that day across Focus and the planner; recurring chores can repeat on a schedule, materialising each week by themselves.

Deliberately outside the score

List items never count toward your week’s balance, even when they’re dated. That’s a feature: the score measures how you showed up for your roles, and a heroic week of errands shouldn’t be able to impersonate one.

With the week planned and the rest parked, one question remains: how did it go? On to reviews and Balance.