How and why to use a Waiting For list

Being intentional about things that are not in your control.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Life is full of items that have your attention but are out of your control: The email reply you are expecting, the reimbursement request you put in weeks ago, the feedback on the journal article you submitted. How do you keep these kinds of things on your radar screen and not slipping through the cracks, without consuming unnecessary time and brain cells? You might be on the ball with your tasks, projects, and information. But what if the ball is in someone else’s court?

Enter the Waiting For list. I mentioned this concept in my post on 20 small steps to an intentional summer, right alongside the Someday/Maybe list and stated that this pair of lists was central to Getting Things Done practice. The Someday/Maybe list has its own deep dive on this blog, so let’s give the Waiting For list the same treatment. In this post, I’ll explain what the Waiting For list is, why you should have one (even if you are not going all-in with GTD), and how to make and use one using tools you already have on hand.

What is the Waiting For list?

The Waiting For list contains anything that needs your attention, but the next action belongs to someone else. This might include:

• Replies to emails, calls, or texts

• Items or reimbursements that you have requested

• Information or approvals needed from another person

• Shipments of physical items

• Tasks that you’ve delegated to others

Every area of life has these kinds of items, but academic work seems to have more than others. Education takes place in a dense web of relationships, and among our close peers, we tend to collaborate and share responsibility for each others’ work. So it’s important to track our commitments to others as well as others’ commitments to us. The Next Actions and Projects lists do the former; the Waiting For list does the latter.

Each of us has a list of Waiting For items that is perhaps longer than we realize. Right now, a few of the items on my own Waiting For list include:

• An order of strings for one of my bass guitars

• Reimbursement for travel to a speaking engagement earlier this year

• A reply to an email I sent to a host institution regarding a speaking engagement later this year

• My US passport that I sent off for renewal a couple of weeks ago

• A set list for a musical performance I am doing in July

All of these items represent tasks, where the ball is in someone else’s court. I can’t do these tasks for these folks, but I need to make sure they get done. So I put them somewhere that is not in my conscious mind but in a trusted place where I can remind myself later about them and take further action if needed. That’s the Waiting For list.

Why use a Waiting For list?

The short answer to this question is that humans are terrible at remembering things.

This classic study famously found that normal humans can only hold between 5 and 9 things in short term memory¹. More recent studies suggest this “5 ± 2” figure is optimistic and the true number could be lower. As David Allen said: Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

We also tend to exhibit foresight bias, where we believe — often erroneously — that we will remember something easily in the future because it is easy to think about in the present. Imagine a student who, when reading through their class notes, says This is all familiar and I will definitely remember it for the exam without testing recall. But we know how that situation often turns out. We are not exempt: When something gets our attention, we think we will remember it because it’s so cool in the moment, it seems impossible to forget. But in reality it’s just one of the 5 ± 2 items in your memory competing for space, and if we don’t Capture it, it’s likely to slip away forever.

Additionally, I know this may come as a shock, but a lot of people do not have their act together. They have all kinds of leaks in their systems for handling information, or they have no system. Although they realize that need to do something for you (reply to an email, schedule a meeting, read a manuscript, etc.) they have an unintentional approach to their work, and they drop the ball — they simply forget about it, or it gets buried among the avalanche of other items competing for headspace. The term used is “slip through the cracks”.

Let me be clear about that term, “slip through the cracks”: Professionals should not have cracks through which important commitments slip. Part of our jobs as professionals is to have crack-less systems. This is hard work and a lifelong process and will all slip up from time to time with commitments to others. But having cracks in your system (or having no system) and having other people’s commitments constantly slip through them, is not a good look — it’s unprofessional, and fairly or otherwise it signals on a deep level that you can’t be fully trusted with something important².

So one of the biggest reasons for using a Waiting For list is that it allows you to exhibit kindness to others who may not have your skills at managing “stuff”, specifically the kindness of tracking these items for them, before they disappear into a crack.

How to make and use a Waiting For list

Making a Waiting For list is easy. Just pick a medium — paper, Google Docs, your favorite note-taking app, whatever³ — and put “Waiting For” in the title or on the page. (Mine is a plain Markdown file that lives inside Obsidian, which I use for notes.) This typically takes less than 30 seconds and costs nothing. Go do it right now, in fact, if you don’t have one already.

Next, populate that list. Take 15 minutes to brain-dump everything you are waiting for. Chances are that you won’t recall everything during that initial setup, and that’s OK. You will pick up more items for the list in the course of your daily life, and a solid weekly review will generate other things that are further back in the recesses of your brain. But as you think of items, just put them on the list. I tend to enter three pieces of information for each item:

• “What”: The thing I am waiting for;

• “Who”: The person whose court the ball is currently in; and

• “When”: The date that I initiated the request for the thing I am waiting for.

For example: Reimbursement for talk at Big State University, Alice Smith 2025-06-10. I’ll explain why these three points of information are important in a minute.

The moment that you become aware of something that needs your attention but the next action is being handled by someone else, it should go on the Waiting For list. This might happen during the course of a normal day or at a weekly review as you go through the Clarify process. But the key is to enter it into the list as soon as you are aware of it — don’t try to hold the idea in memory until later. (Remember what we said about short-term memory?) The whole idea here is to take these pending waiting-for items out of your memory and into a trusted system, that you then review on a regular basis.

Speaking of review: Periodically — ideally at the weekly review — you review what’s on the Waiting For list, reminding yourself of what pending items are still “out there”. If a past Waiting For item has been resolved, then you can cross it off. On the other hand, if an item has been sitting unresolved for longer than you like, add a new task to your next actions list: Follow up with [person] about [Waiting For item]. Give the person a nudge to remind them that you are waiting. This can be uncomfortable, so consider phrasing your followup as a question, or an offer to help. For example:

Hi Prof. Smith, I’m emailing to see if you needed anything from me to process my reimbursement for the talk I gave at Big State University. I submitted the receipts and forms on 2025-06-10 and was wondering if I needed to resend any of those. Thanks!

Notice how this uses all three of the info items in the Waiting For list: The person, the item, and especially the date. Using specific dates signals to the other person that you are keeping detailed records of this situation even if they aren’t and that you are not letting things “slip through the cracks” even if they are. Compare the message I was wondering if you had a chance to read my earlier email with the more specific I was wondering if you had a chance to read my email that I sent on Jun 10, 2025 . The date commands attention, and it’s a way to get the other person moving on the Waiting For item without being pushy. Keeping all that information in the Waiting For list lets you craft more effective follow-ups if it becomes necessary.

Story time

The Waiting For list really becomes valuable when money gets involved. I personally have probably saved thousands of dollars, often in the form of speaking and writing fees by having a functioning Waiting For list. Here is an example.

I recently gave a talk at a college which had agreed to pay a speaker fee and cover my travel expenses. At my next weekly review, I entered this into my Waiting For list. My contract says that the host will remit payment within 30 days of the event. Each subsequent week, at my weekly review, I was reminded that I hadn’t been paid yet⁴. Early on, this was not a concern. After three weeks, I was starting to get a little impatient. After five weeks had passed, we were beyond the 30-day period and I had to act.

So I emailed the appropriate person with a followup. Dear Betty, I hope you are well. I had a great time at Big State University giving that talk on April 10. I was wondering if you could give me a status update on the payment for the event? I submitted my forms and receipts in an email on April 14 but have not received payment yet, and I want to make sure you have everything you need.

Two days later I got a reply. Betty (not their real name) had indeed gotten my forms and receipts from my first email and uploaded them to the campus procurement website for processing — but had forgotten to click the “Submit” button! From Betty’s point of view, her role in my situation was done and the ball was in Procurement’s court. Procurement had no way of knowing they should expect some forms from me to process a reimbursement. It was just a simple mistake and suddenly nobody was looped in. Nobody except me, and if I hadn’t looped myself in with a Waiting For list, it’s possible I’d never get paid for that talk because I would have just forgotten about it⁵. But once I was able to nudge Betty, she just had to click the button, and I had my payment three days later.

Now you do it

Even if you are not using the full spectrum of GTD practices, a Waiting For list is a great idea to take a load off your brain and be intentional about your commitments to others. Take 30 minutes today and go through the steps that I outlined above to make and populate one; then sit down over the weekend and review it, update it, and set up action items for Waiting For stuff that feels stuck.

Etc.

• I recently jumped on a promotional deal to trade in my aging Garmin Venu 2 smartwatch for a Pixel Watch 3, and I discovered a potentially game-changing feature: Unlike the Garmin, the Pixel watch has a microphone and you can create or manipulate Google Keep notes using voice-to-text. I’ve sung the praises of Google Keep before as an underrated, simple tool for Capture and now I can do this on the fly even without a phone or computer. I just say to my watch, “Hey Google, make a note about…” and it captures what I say into a Google Keep note. At my daily review, I’ve added Google Keep as one of the “inboxes” I clear out, and I go through and Clarify all those captured notes and get them to the right place. You probably already knew this, and I’m sure Apple Watches have similar functionality, but it’s a significant reduction in the amount of friction encountered when capturing something, and I am using this feature constantly.

• If you’re checking out task manager or to-do list apps, Structured is an interesting entry into a crowded field. It organizes to-do items into time blocks on a daily calendar, in a package that has a minimalist visual appeal. It’s been said that time blocking is the only productivity hack, and I’ve written here about why it’s important for academics, so you might check it out.

A look at the UI for the Structured task/calendar app.

• Music: Tony Franklin, a.k.a. “The Fretless Monster”, is on my Mount Rushmore of bassists for his innovative use of the fretless bass in rock music. He’s also one of the nicest and most generous people alive, always happy to interact with fans (like me) on the internet. He has just joined a new music project, Al Nesbitt & The Alchemy. It’s an interesting and groovy mix of rock, jazz, and Latin music. An EP is forthcoming; here’s a sample.

Until next time!

1. That is, discrete and unrelated items. One of “make it stick” strategies for learning and teaching is to teach the interconnectedness of ideas so that several discrete concepts actually appear in memory as one big idea.

2. And please, for goodness’ sake, if you do drop the ball on a commitment in this way, don’t use “it slipped through the cracks” as an excuse. Just own it and fix it: I apologize, I should have replied to that email/sent you that thing/done that task for you sooner. And then reply to the email, send the thing, do the task right then as if it were your highest priority.

3. I typically recommend something electronic, multiplatform, and synced across devices, because you never know when or where you might need to refer to the list. There is a great appeal to analog/paper approaches, though. I just can’t commit to carrying around a notebook everywhere, whereas I almost always have my phone on me.

4. Otherwise I wasn’t thinking about it, because why should I? I can’t do anything about it, so it stays parked in a list that I review.

5. I was in the midst of a very busy time of talks, ten of them in the space of one semester, so forgetting that I hadn’t been paid is a real possibility.