Why just a to-do list isn’t helping you manage your time.
I’ve been a productivity fanatic all my life because I always wanted to best I could be (still do), but somehow I just found out I wasn’t. There are several facets of my life that I have made much improvement with the help of some great people who have influenced me, and one of them is how I handle my time. Which I will share with you. This isn’t something I just copied somewhere, but something I had to learn from painful experience, which proves to be quite helpful to me today.
If you are like me, you probably spent time thinking about time management, reading books, using a to-do list, and you felt you were right on your way to time management mastery, but after each day, you gauge what you’ve done and you are just disappointed. How do you solve this?
Well, let me tell you what a to-do list does first.
What is the use of a to-do list?
I always had the impression that as long as I could write out a list of all I wanted to do, then that means I will finish or do the most part after the end of the day and as the story goes I usually don’t. Why? Because I’m not doing anything different from anybody else.
Seyi, what do you mean, to-do lists are ranked one of the greatest productivity tools out there.
The truth is that everyone you know, usually at a point in their day, lists out what they want to do that day, either on paper or in their head. The difference is that yours is just on papers, and sadly just listing it out doesn’t mean you’ll do it. In fact, in your experience, you must have met several people who don’t use to-do lists but are productive.
Now, is this to defame to-do lists? Absolutely not.
To-do lists are helpful to REMEMBER the things you want to do, it helps you remember the little details, but it doesn’t make you DO it.
What you need is something that helps you do what you want to do.
How do I do the things I want to do?
Well, after several years of failing terribly at time management. There came a time when I surrounded myself with very effective people, and when they spoke to me about my bad habits, my errors became extremely clear.
I had no priority.
Wait wait wait, priority? That same stuff? I’ve heard that in every time management book, this post turned out to be a waste of my time.
Wait. Before you close this post, let me ask you, even though you have heard this advice a thousand times, are you sure you prioritize?
Let’s see, imagine I wanted to manage my money, and I made a thousand dollars, and I made a list of everything I wanted to pay for.
Here’s my list:
Food, a massage chair, clothes, a new car, my rent, the new ps5 gamer console, travel for a vacation.
Now, I’m Nigerian and I don’t know the cost of things wherever you are, but I’m just going to estimate the costs (pardon me if my estimates are outrageous).
Imagine I buy a ps5 for $300, then I pay my rent for $400, and then I get a massage chair of $300, and then I have $100 left for my clothes and food.
Most people will go like, ah-ah! Such terrible spending decision, I could never do that, but that is the way we treat our time. We forget that the resource of time, just like money, is never enough to meet ALL your desires, so you have to DROP something to GET something.
Prioritization doesn’t mean listing out the important things with the non-important, it means cutting out the non-important ones to get the important ones.
Most of us start our days with movies, unfruitful chats, and social media posts — things that bring no value to us at the end of the day. Are these things bad? Not at all, but they are sucking out your productivity. You can’t eat your cake and have it, you have to lose something to manage time. Time management is first about dropping something before you can pick something up.
So, upon realizing this, I always ask myself, is this the most important thing to do with this time? When someone comes to me with a new gist, I am very intentional with how I speak, I will only speak to build the relationship and engage you, but the moment the chat starts to lacks value and there is something more important to do, that’s the end.
I love speaking to people, and I spend time doing this, but not when we just speak about things that have no benefit. When do I have such gist though? When I know that I don’t have something more important I can do with that time.
It’s not being rude, it’s being deliberate. Mind you, I have a ton of friends, because like I mentioned, I spend my time having valuable conversations; which people appreciate. In fact, I have noticed that the level of closeness you have with a person doesn’t equate to the amount of time you have spent together — but the value.
So, what is YOUR time-waster?
It is different for all of us, and usually, we have several time-wasters at once. You just need to know what you are doing with your time. Are you spending too much time on Instagram? Are you too much of a gamer? Do you chat endlessly during the day? Do you spend too much time watching TV?
Being busy doesn’t equate to being productive. You can spend your day moving from one activity to the other, but that doesn’t mean you were productive. Productivity is value, focus on your high-value activities. If you’re conversant with the Pareto principle, you can relate this to that, it works for all facets of our lives.
With these few points of mine, I hope I have been able to convince you and not to confuse you (Please, I love the art of cliché), that you need to start taking something out, to put something in. Thank you.
PS: I work as an article writer on Fiverr, so if you perhaps want to hire me, I’ll post the link below. Yes, I am shamelessly promoting myself. Cheers!
