Power-up Your Productivity – 7 Steps to an Awesome To-do List

Fail to plan, then plan to fail. If you don’t know what you are going to do each day, then you will waste hours drifting from one task to another, with no relation to your long term goals. If you aren’t working towards your long term goals every day, then you aren’t going to achieve them.

1. Let’s start with your to-do list.

   If you haven’t got a list of tasks, you need to do then get yourself a notebook and get writing. Alternatively, make your to-do list awesome, use a productivity platform to manage your tasks online. Access your list wherever you are without having to remember your notebook.

2. Write your list the night before.

   This saves you time in the morning and helps you to get going straight away at what may be your most productive time. It has also been shown to improve your sleep, as you reduce anxiety by getting it out of your mind and onto a list. Less stress and better sleep will power-up your productivity.

3. Only write down the tasks that you need to do tomorrow.

   Your to-do list is not a wish list; it needs to be achievable in the time that you have available. Ensure that the tasks are well-defined, so, that it will be evident that they have been completed. By all means, keep a separate list of jobs that need to be done in future, but make sure that you will finish your to-do list.

4. Order your list by priority

   Stick to the order that you have created. If you need to do something urgently, then put it as your first job of the day, and build your list from there.

5. Edit your list.

   Your first attempt won’t be your best. Do you need to do everything? How does it relate to your long term goals? Do you need to do it tomorrow? If you can’t justify it being there then cut it.

6. Fill up someone else’s list.

   If someone else can do the job better, quicker, or for less money then get them to do it instead. With a productivity platform, like a workflow management system, then it should be easy to allocate work to other team members, or even to external contractors via integration.

7. Set time limits for each task.

   Don’t leave the tasks open-ended. If you put a task on that can drift. For example, if you are writing a blog post, then the 30 minutes you thought it would take soon turns into a couple of hours. So, instead, set a start and end time from each task, and focus on getting finished inside the limit.

Now you have a list of only the most important tasks, that support your long-term goals, that only you can do, that must be done tomorrow, and that have time blocks set aside to ensure that they are finished in the time available to you. Use your new awesome to-do list to power up your productivity.