One of the things that has always struck me about amazingly productive people is their ability to quickly decide whether something is essential. These incredibly effective people seem to be able to eliminate the unimportant and only focus on tasks that will move them closer towards their goals.

A better way of making sure you get the important things done.

I recommend you collect all the routine tasks you must do daily, weekly and monthly and then separate them into their own list. What this does is help remove tasks that need doing but do not improve the quality of your life or take you closer towards achieving your goals. Those things must be done: taking the garbage out, doing the weekly sales report or cleaning your house. These tasks will not take you further to achieving the goals you have set for yourself. Essentially, you are demoting their importance to you so you can focus on the higher-quality tasks.

We naturally move towards the easy tasks.

The problem is when you have a to-do list full of essential and unimportant tasks, you will naturally navigate towards doing the easy tasks. Doing the quick, easy tasks gives you the dopamine hit we crave, and you see your to-do list shrink. The problem is you also feel you are accomplishing something, yet if you took a step back, you would realise you are accomplishing nothing important.

The more complex, longer tasks get pushed back, left to do when you are tired or about to finish for the day. The problem is that the more complex, more challenging tasks are the important ones. The tasks that would accelerate you towards achieving the things you want to achieve.

A far better way to manage your to-do list is to relegate those easy routine tasks to the end of the day. This is why moving your routine tasks into a separate list helps to stop you from being tempted into doing them at the expense of the more critical tasks.

The question is, how do you do that?

The first thing you can do is sit down and look at your to-do list from the last week. Look at the tasks you completed, find the tasks you have to do every day or week and write them down on a list. Once you have collected all those tasks onto a list, find the ones that have to be done regularly, either daily, weekly or monthly and decide whether they are tasks that improve you as a person and take you closer towards achieving your goals. If they don’t, they are likely to be routine tasks, and you can move those tasks into a separate list called “routines”.

A task such as “schedule this week’s exercise” may look like a routine, but exercise improves the quality of your life. It’s an important task. Tasks such as these do not go on your routines list. However, a task such as “prepare weekly grocery list” is a routine task. It just has to be done. Those kinds of tasks go on your routines list.

I have a weekly task to write this blog post. It comes up on my daily to-do list every Monday. This task is a task that contributes towards my purpose of helping people to become better organised and more productive. I do not consider writing this post a routine. It contributes towards a goal. Yet, cleaning up my folders, project notes, and calendar does not contribute towards my goals, so a task like that would be on my routines list.

Becoming more organised and productive is not just about starting a to-do list. There is much more involved. It’s a great start to write everything down that needs doing, but you also need to attack that list with laser-like focus to establish which tasks are essential and will contribute towards your overall goals and which ones will not. You want to apply Pareto’s Rule to your list by asking yourself which twenty per cent will contribute to eighty per cent of your objectives. Those are the tasks you should focus on completing. The other eighty per cent of your tasks you do when you can, if you have time.

This is why doing the daily planning session works so well. Those ten minutes at the end of the day when you sit down and plan out the next day not only leave you feeling less stressed but also helps you stay focused on the critical work that will turn you into a productivity master. During those ten minutes, you can see what needs doing and make sure the critical tasks get done first so that when you feel tired towards the end of the day, you can be safe knowing you have done your twenty per cent important tasks.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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