Throughout all of our work and all of our life, keeping track of what we need to do and when we need to do it is an increasingly essential part of every day life. Here are the basic principles of how to do this well:
1. Write Everything down
Too many of us rely on our brains to remember things. So our spouse will asks us to pick something up today as we walk out the door and we hope we will remember when we are in town. Or before meeting someone we scribble a few thoughts down on a random piece of paper and hope that covers everything. Our brains are not designed to be faultless repositories of information. Don’t rely on them to be – write it down.
2. Write your tasks clearly – for you future self
Call Dave. We write down an important task for tomorrow. Call Dave. Tomorrow comes and we can think of 5 people called Dave and we have no idea what it is we need to call Dave about and so no idea which Dave to call. Write your tasks clearly and assume the person reading it is pretty clueless.
3. Only give a task a date if you actually plan to do it then
Too often we give tasks a due date in our task manager just to keep the task on our radar. We have no intention of doing the task on Wednesday, but we still set it due on Wednesday so on Wednesday we can decide when to do it, or next be reminded of it. This is silly. Only set a date it you actually plan to do it then and use your daily and weekly planning times to remind yourself of everything you need to do.
4. Don’t overestimate how much you can do in a day
Your line of work will determine how many tasks you can actually do in a day. If it is 30, then only schedule 20-25 tasks. If 20 then no more than 15. To give some examples. If you routinely complete 20 tasks a day then having 40 on your list for the day is a complete waste of time. You know you cannot do the tasks so why plan them in? We need to train ourselves to be a bit more ruthless in keeping our daily list realistic.
5. Organise your tasks in to some kind of a system
For the purposes of this post, I make no comment on what system you should use. We intuitively know that a list of hundreds of disorganised tasks is impossible to engage with and will just be ignored. Don’t do. Adopt a system and organise your tasks according to it. If you want to learn more about how I do it, read these posts on how I use ToDoist and the 4 key components of a good system.
6. Don’t create tasks you don’t need to create.
Some tasks we create knowing full well we will never do them. I am not talking about things that you may do in the future but have no prospect of doing them now. Some tasks we create when we really don’t need to by breaking things down into chunks that are unnecessarily too small. Some tasks we create for things that we habitually do and we have no need of putting them in our task managers. An example of this for me is that years ago I set myself a daily tasks to sweep the kitchen floor at the end of the day. It used to be needed. It no longer is as either I or my wife do it as a simple habit/routine. I can delete this task now. Creating tasks you don’t need clutters your list and we often do it for the dopamine hit of checking off a task and to make ourselves feel more busy than we are.
So – keep it accurate, keep it clear, keep it realistic, keep it clean. The basic principles of task management.
