Complete your tasks effortlessly: tips for managing tasks effectively Pt 1

Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

“I never finish my TO-DO list” “I can’t seem to catch a break and have a work-life balance” “I answer each email as and when it appears in my inbox”. “I am always on Tiktok, Twitter, IG, Facebook” “I never find time for myself” “I am always busyyyyyyyyy” Do you fall under any of these categories? Then, it is time to work on your task management skills and ensure you enjoy all the benefits that come with properly managing your tasks. Due to how broad task management is, I wrote this article in a series.

What is task management?

Task management, according to Airtable, is the process of defining your projects, dividing them into more manageable action items, and continuously prioritising them.

Task management can also be said to be a skill set which is coupled with activities and principles that help you organise your work to complete tasks on time and with high standards.

Learning how to manage tasks effectively is one of the most important things you can do for your career because being able to complete tasks consistently and on time, will earn you a reputation for being a reliable and productive team member. Just as importantly, effective task management makes it less likely you’ll become overwhelmed or end up working extra hours just to keep up with the demands of your job.

What happens to you when you don’t have proper task management?

1. Poor work-life balance: When you don’t manage your tasks well, you miss the opportunity to balance your career and your personal life. As a result, you will have less time for yourself and your family, which will add to your stress. Additionally, this may cause burnout, increase fatigue, and possibly have a negative impact on your health.
2. Missing deadlines: You might find it difficult to complete your tasks consistently and on time, which will make you seem like an unreliable and unproductive team member because, without good time management, you can’t accurately estimate how long a task will take you and you will be forced to work quickly or submit your task late.
3. You will easily become overwhelmed with tasks.
4. You might end up working extra hours and on the weekends, just to keep up with the demands of your job.

What does bad task management look like?

Have you ever heard the popular saying “Busy doing nothing”? That might be your situation. Just because you have a packed schedule with regular reminders does not guarantee that you are managing your task well. It might just be an indication that you are “busy”, but you might still not be making the most of your time. Yup, I said that.

Here are what bad task management looks like:

1. Poorly defined scope of tasks & Unrealistic deadlines: You are likely to miss your deadlines if your task management is unsatisfactory. This could significantly impact how well you perform at work.
2. Lack of accountability
3. You sabotage your own schedule: This happens because you constantly push tasks to the next day, even when you are supposed to work on them today. This is your cue to not procrastinate on that task!
4. You treat your body like a punching bag because you don’t find time to rest and do other things that help you recharge your mental battery and energy.
5. You give people unrestricted access to yourself: Imagine working during your vacation or on holidays because your boss, manager or colleague randomly remembered an “important” task that requires your attention “immediately”. Proper task management helps you prevent scenarios like this from happening because you complete your tasks during weekdays and you will have your weekend and holidays to rest.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on pexels.com

Here are what good task management looks like

1. Good work-life balance.
2. Complex projects and tasks get cleared with ease.
3. Improved productivity.
4. Increased efficiency.
5. Reduced stress.
6. Personal, client, stakeholders & customer satisfaction.

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

How can you manage your tasks effectively?

There are so many methods of managing tasks effectively, you need to find methods that work for you and stick to them. Here are some tips to help you out.

1. Create an effective schedule: This helps you organise your tasks around your time in the most productive manner. When creating your schedule, consider your peak productive and lagging hours, team members’ and collaborators’ schedules, task priority, and other factors.
2. Break up big projects into smaller tasks: Before undertaking any task, break it up into smaller parts. It may seem counterintuitive to give yourself “more” tasks, but it’s really just a way to visualise a large-scope task, which can be overwhelming and stress-inducing, in more manageable and (more importantly) measurable chunks.
3. Create a priority to-do list: After you have identified a complete list of all tasks you have, the next step is to prioritise them into levels of importance and urgency. One of the best ways to prioritise tasks is by using an Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower matrix is a productivity, prioritisation, and time-management framework that enables you to prioritise/rank a list of tasks by first classifying them based on their relevance and level of urgency

Eisenhower Matrix

4. Keep your tasks in one place: Unifying everything under one planner is fundamentally faster because it eliminates both the time wasted when physically switching between modalities, and the time taken by the brain for cognitive resetting, too.

5. Set deadlines and stick to them: Elon Musk once said, “If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take you 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours. The same applies to your goals, ambitions, and potential.”

Treating deadlines as firm boundaries can be another effective tactic for managing tasks. While it may seem self-evident, it’s worth a reminder that movable due dates delay task completion, sometimes indefinitely! So plan for it by tracking actual task completion to scheduled task completion time.

6. Eat the Frog or take the fish bait: The idea here is that if you go ahead and knock out the least appealing (or most intimidating, most difficult, etc.) task on your list, then the rest of your day can only get better. As a bonus, you’ll achieve a sense of satisfaction and you won’t have to spend the rest of the day dreading the most undesirable tasks.

Eat the frog

7. Focus on one task at a time: Multitasking is a great way to accomplish many low-concentration tasks at one time, but there’s simply no application for it with high-attention work; any attempt to do so will rapidly drain your energy. According to Healthshots, multitasking mentally tires you, increases stress levels, makes you less productive, makes you lose focus and can cause memory problems.

8. Batch your tasks: I will use an example to explain this point. Let’s assume you want to work on designing mobile apps today. Focus on everything that is related to designing the mobile app, this includes style guides, Frame selection, sketching etc, instead of jumping from UX design to UI design and then UX writing. Find the category the bulk of your task falls under, and tackle it. Instead of constantly shifting your attention from one task to the other, try focusing on one task for a few hours when you have a challenging task to do.

9. Limit the number of tasks per day: A long list of incomplete tasks can be overwhelming in any case, but over-exerting yourself will probably make you feel worse, not better. The trick is skillful scheduling, whereby you can allocate the perfect amount of work to the day.

10. Collaborate whenever possible: One of the benefits of working in a company is having team members you can get assistance from and collaborate with to complete tasks faster and better. Reach out to your team members and like-minded professionals and build relationships so you can ask for help and collaborate when you need to. This increases your capacity to handle tasks and perform better at work.

11. Reward yourself when you finish a task: Checking off tasks makes you feel more accomplished, and it’s very addictive, making you more likely to complete another task, and then another! You can reward yourself by calling a friend or family member who makes you laugh.

According to Tony Robbins, “by rewarding yourself in the moment, your brain elicits positive emotions, leading to the realization that your efforts result in a positive reward. By doing this continuously, your brain will start to link pleasure to accomplishing the task or objective and move towards it in the future”

12. Review and reflect on your progress: Write down the tasks you’ve finished, think about what you learned about yourself and your optimal working techniques and conditions. An end-of-day review allows you to observe strengths and weaknesses and actively take steps to continuously develop your productivity practices.

Conclusion

For many people, managing an almost “never-ending” list of tasks is difficult. However, having an effective task management structure, which includes alignment on requirements and procedures, and constant prioritisation, will help you finish tasks more quickly.

In the continuation of this series, I will talk about the things you need to know about task management and the tools and techniques that help me manage my tasks. Don’t miss it. See you next week