How to write a better To-Do list
It’s almost night, I looked at my to-do and found thousands of undone tasks greeting me, I felt terrified and pissed off of the wasted time regardless of how much I’ve done.
Writing your to-do’s is like the blueprint you gonna follow throughout the day, the better you write it, the better you will perform. The methods vary here and there, the best method is the one that fits you the most, meanwhile, there are mistakes that should be considered and avoided. So how to write a better to-do list and increase your productivity? This is exactly what we gonna see in this post:
1. Choose The Right Method
.MITs: Leo Babauta of Zen to Done recommends starting each day by choosing one to three tasks to focus on that day. These are your Most Important Tasks (MIT) and you should not work on anything else until these are completed.
.The Ivy Lee Method: At the end of each workday, pick-six tasks to focus on tomorrow, prioritize from 1-6, then work on them in priority order, just one by one.
.1-3-9: At the beginning of each workday, choose 13 tasks to focus on: one high-priority task, three medium-priority tasks, and nine low-priority tasks. Do the high-priority task first, followed by the medium-priority ones, and finally the low-priority ones.
2. Delete Low/No Value Tasks
The purpose of making a to-do list is to increase our productivity by focusing on managing and prioritizing tasks, thus getting things done.
It’s not a journal of our life, a to-do list has to be simple and easily scannable. I remember when writing a to-do took me centuries and at the end of the day, I’ve got nothing done. I was writing all tasks, including unnecessary ones which made it overwhelming. Follow the methods above in order to avoid this mistake.
3. Differentiate Between: Tasks / Objectives / Goals
Every task you do is an action you perform to reach an objective, the last one and the tasks are aiming for a bigger goal.
With an example, it will be crystal clear:
For instance, if you want to learn German, thus “becoming fluent in German“ is your goal, it’s the big-picture achievement or desired outcome. Goals are unquantifiable.
But the fact that you want to be able to “hold a conversation about my favorite movie for five minutes” is an objective. It’s quantifiable and specific. Objectives are markers on the way to reaching a goal.
Break an objective down and you will get tasks that are usually single events that can be repeated on a daily basis, in our case the ideal task that should be on your to-do is:
“learn German for 30 minutes”
Objectives and tasks are pretty similar, but remember that objectives are like milestones, whereas tasks are actions to achieve those milestones. On the other hand, the goal is the bigger picture that you’re aiming for.
