The To-Do List of a Genius

The Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University

What’s on your to-do list today? Pick up groceries? Get your car washed? Go to a few meetings?  Get ready to be “one upped” by a genius.  Enter…Thomas Edison’s to-do list.

On his list of “things doing and to be done,” the 41-year-old wrote:

• Deaf apparatus
• Electrical piano
• Artificial silk
• Phonographic clock
• Ink for Blind

Just a few things to get done before lunch…really…

This list was created around 1888 and can be seen in The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: Losses and Loyalties — the seventh volume of Rutgers University’s digitized Edison papers.

Add Edison to the long list of famous and successful list-makers like John Lennon, Johnny Cash and Ronald Reagan.  They’ve proved that keeping to-do lists will make you successful.  Keep listing!