In this article, I’m going to talk about to do lists. I’ll share the simplest and best way to create and organise a to do list and how to use it on a day to day basis. I’ve used this technique for years and it’s worked for me. I hope you find it useful.
The first and most fundamental tip is to have a list. Simply getting the list written down helps you to quantify and establish what you need to do. You should be wary of doing any work that is not on your to do list. I only work on ad hoc tasks once I’ve put them on my list, that way I get a warm feeling when I tick them off and I have a record of the tasks I’ve been working on. You may find that you task list runs to several pages, if it does, don’t worry, the important thing is that you have a list.
Divide your tasks into categories. Trust me, you won’t have a problem deciding which tasks fall into which categories, and if you do, simply put them into higher of the two categories you are torn between and review your choice another day. The important thing is to make a categorisation as this is the order you will work through the tasks.
Take a piece of paper and divide it into four quarters.
You should set up your categories as follows;
· Urgent / Important – this is the top category and goes in the top left hand quarter. Items in this category are important, in that they contribute directly to your job or goals. They are defined as urgent as, if neglected, it will be of detriment to your job or goals.
· Less Urgent / Important – Items in this category are important, in that they contribute directly to your job or goals. These tasks go in the top right hand quarter. However, they may relate to tasks that have to be completed at some stage in the future so you may have the luxury of deciding when you work on them.
· Urgent / Less Important – Items in this category are not that important, but are urgent; these tasks go in the bottom left quarter. Perhaps an email that, whilst not important for your project, has been chased up and you really should respond in order to help someone else out. You may not be surprised to find that a lot of emails from your boss tend to fall into this category!
· Less Urgent / Less Important – Items in this category are neither important or urgent and go in the bottom right hand quarter. If you are busy with the other categories, you will find that items on this list rarely get done. I find that my Less Urgent / Less Important list sits neglected for weeks at a time and every now and again I review the list and find that a number of these items will have been overtaken by events and can simply be taken off the list without any work. There is nothing that will save you more time than not doing a task!
Once you’ve set up your to do list in the manner I’ve suggested, you can then simply work on your tasks in category order, starting at the top left, then top right, then bottom left and bottom right.
If you work on your tasks in the order recommended above, you should find that the number of tasks you are working on in the Urgent Important category should reduce as you get control of your task list. In fact, you should find that you start to work more on the Less Urgent / Important tasks as you move off the back foot and start to work on planned tasks rather than ad hoc tasks.
Once you have your tasks list and categorised, the next step is to look at what you have to do each day. The key trick to making progress is to GET ON WITH IT! I’m sorry to shout, but it is very easy to sit on a task and not progress it. The way to stop this tendency is to prepare a shortlist of tasks that you intend to do today; not tomorrow, today. Either last thing at night or first thing in the morning, you should look, using the categories detailed above and select the most important tasks that you think, given a good run, you should be able to get through in a single day. Don’t worry too much about estimating how much work you can get through in a day, after all, you can always go back to your main list and select more tasks or carry tasks over to the next day. I guarantee that you will tend to carry tasks more often than you go and get more from your list as, with the best will in the world, we all tend to underestimate the scale of any given task.
The act of preparing a shortlist (I scribble it on a scrap of paper and keep it in my top pocket) is that it sets you a target that you feel obligated to try and achieve. Simply having a small, supposedly achievable, list gives you two things. Firstly, you feel that you have made a promise to yourself earlier in the day to try and finish those tasks and secondly, if you find yourself wondering what to do next, you have a ready made list of the important tasks to hand. Remember, if you don’t have that to hand, you will probably fill in the time with a distraction activity, such as chatting to a colleague.
The value of the task list is that you consciously try to avoid working on tasks that are not on the list whilst prioritising those that are. Just the fact that your tasks are readily available to read makes it more likely that you will work on those tasks over the myriad of other things that may be jockeying for your attention. You should avoid the temptation to keep a couple of long term tasks on the “back burner” to work on as and when you get time; either the task is important or it isn’t. If a task is important and has any kind of complexity to it you must allocate time to doing it. It is easy to think that you can complete a large task by working on it in your “spare time”, however, you would be wrong. If it needs doing, categorise and then prioritise it.
I hope that this has given you a “starter for ten” on how best to create and manage a to do list. As I said at the beginning of the article, I use this method and it works for me. Please feel free to comment if you find this useful.
