Time to be honest about your to-do list, if you have one. If yours is mostly left uncompleted at the end of each day, is packed full of vague (i.e., not smart) goals, or overall makes you feel less organized, you need an update. Again, let’s remember that the list itself is nothing special—it’s what it represents. A list needs to be focused, relevant, and achievable. It needs to work, and there are multiple ways to be strategic in how you organize it. What works for one person may not work for another; in the end, it doesn’t really matter which method you choose.
One way to de-bloat a to-do list that’s gotten too long for its own good is to simply ignore everything except a maximum of three tasks per day—make sure to list out smaller subtasks that fall under those three larger tasks to get the ball rolling for yourself. You tackle these first and foremost, and you list everything else under the “nice to do” category. Even if at the end of the day some items remain undone, you get the satisfaction of knowing your most important tasks were completed. We have a limited amount of energy each day, so spending it on the most important tasks you’ve identified could make sense. It turns out that many tasks that we think are important can afford to be pushed or postponed without any negative effects—this is something we’ll cover later when we talk about the Eisenhower Matrix. And of course, with only three items, there is something motivating about actually accomplishing what you set out to do for a day instead of only chipping away at an enormous list that makes you feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up a hill.
Other people like to look at the day ahead holistically and set an intention for what they want to achieve overall. It may be something like “Today I’ll commit to facing my challenges head-on and calmly,” or it could be “By the end of the day I want to feel more in control of this project and a bit clearer on the way forward,” and so on. This could manifest as a tangible, quantifiable result (“I want to have read these five chapters by the end of the day”) or not. That’s up to you. Call it a mission of the day, which then ends up setting the tone for all the tasks to follow.
With the sole intention and mission spoken into reality, it’s time to think about the to-do list that supports them. Bearing the Pareto principle in mind (focus on the 20% of the work that gives 80% of the results), try to narrow your list into two larger tasks and three smaller tasks. Larger tasks will take up to two hours to complete, while smaller tasks will take up to 30 minutes to complete.
Intentionally limit yourself to those five task slots a day—this also sets an upper limit on your workload of roughly 5.5 hours a day. Depending on your context and capacity, you can also create nine slots overall: one large task, three medium tasks, and five small tasks. This will still provide focus and intention while limiting the number of tasks on your plate.
These limitations truly force you to cut down on overwhelming feelings and force you to think about what’s really important and what is really leading to your intention and mission. It’s like you’ve set a deadline for yourself, which means that you can’t dillydally or squander time like you normally would. So take a while to identify each task and get an idea of why you’re doing it, what’s needed, and how long it will take. If you’re timeboxing, schedule these items, building in ample room for breaks and an opportunity to appraise and adapt as necessary. If you’re “unscheduling,” commit to finding the flow for at least 30 minutes and go from there.
From here, we go slightly backward: how do you actually decide what’s most important and what is a big or small task? When you have many different things that need to get done, it can be difficult to know where to start. To succeed with your to-do list, you’ll need a way to determine which projects should come first and which can wait. And in fact, assigning value and weighting your to-do list becomes another type of method in itself. One of the most popular ways to do this is to rate using three metrics: seriousness, urgency, and growth. Seriousness speaks to how important the task is, urgency notes how soon the task is due, and growth describes how quickly the problem will get worse if it isn’t handled immediately. These metrics place your tasks into the real world and look at consequences.
Rate your tasks on a scale of 1–5 for each category and see how things shake out. You might be surprised. An additional factor might be to analyze the amount of time each task takes. Now you truly have a dynamic to-do list that is more helpful than a series of bullet points.
