Before I started making lists the night before, each evening I would feed my pets, play a little bit of Xbox, and spend the next several hours as wired and anxiety-filled about the next day’s tasks as someone who had just downed several 5-hour energy shots within a four-minute window. Not only did this kill my organization, it ate away at my sleep time, making me tired, cranky and less-than-productive the following day.

However, once I began writing my to-do lists the night before, I could see The Big Picture. I could mentally prepare myself for what had to be done. I could shut my eyes, drift off and know that everything I had to do the next day was contained on a piece of paper. All I needed to do was run through it, cross off each task, and put the leftovers on the new list, and this made a huge difference in how I tackled my duties and how much I got done every single day.

As a computer fiend with an ever-diminishing amount of writing utensils in my home, my handwriting had gone from easily legible to emergency room doctor. Consequently, I would write task lists, walk away for 10 minutes and come back to a paper that I swore was switched out with one written by a four-year-old.

So my solution was to write tasks in blocky caps. It took a bit of discipline, but I could read exactly what I put down, instead of wondering why I wrote “bring dog to pizza” instead of “finish blog post on the burgeoning relationship between social media and the pygmy goat industry.”

The telecommuter formerly known as me, version 1.0, was a world-class planner that listed out so many tasks, that writing out my to-do list was an achievement in itself. “Look at all these awesome things I can finish today!” I’d say each morning, only to deflate like a balloon after sunset when I realized that I only finished six or seven out of my ultra-ambitious list of 160 duties.

After the ego-busting experience of making it through a tiny fraction of each list every day, I had a “Come to Jesus” with myself about what I could honestly finish within a span of 10 or 12 hours. This meant accepting that I was a human being with normal limitations, not a super-computer, a robot, or a professional World of Warcraft Relic Farmer. That in itself removed a lot of pressure associated with my to-do lists, and helped me recognize that I needed to see my task sheets as partially complete rather than almost completely unfinished.

When I streamlined and perfected my task-taking skills, I became calmer, more organized, and a better remote worker. For those of you who live and die by technology and mobile devices – good on you – but I’ll stick with my bullet points, ball-point pen and old-school paper notebook.