Consider starting a relationship (romantic or otherwise) with someone you’ve just met. You tell them your most embarrassing stories and most intimate secrets, share all your baby pictures, and let them in on your favorite color, animal, and flower. They now know everything there is to know about you.

But do you trust them just because they know all this information? No.

You trust them because of how they act with that information.

Similarly, lists don’t work if you can’t trust them. If I have to waste time and energy reminding myself to remember things that aren’t tucked away safely on a list, then my entire system fails me.

Once you’ve gotten into the habit, your lists may very well have every activity, task, appointment, and idea captured. But being able to trust your list only starts there.

Now, I love lists — I keep lists for my Most Important Tasks, my Next Actions, the food I’m going to eat today, and my AM/PM routines, among other things. While I would certainly survive without them, trusting my trivialities to my lists frees my personal resources up for more important things.

I’m often tempted to cross off an item on a list that I’m sure I’m about to complete, but I haven’t actually completed. For example, checking off “Call Jon” right before I’m about to call him. On the surface, this seems innocent enough.

But what if the phone rings the next second, and I get distracted, and I never call Jon? I already checked it off. I now need to remember that I still need to call Jon, even though it’s checked off on my list. There’s a chance that I might forget to mark my list accordingly, and won’t call Jon at all, because the closed checkbox doesn’t catch my attention.

Paranoia? It might sound that way. But my mantra is freedom through organization, and it’s not freedom if I’m wasting energy questioning the validity of my Next Actions list.

The next time you’re tempted to mark an item you haven’t completed as done, don’t. You can always check it off later, after it’s really done.