As promised on Monday, today’s post focuses on creating a to do list that will help you get your goals done. Once again, I’ll be borrowing from Michael Hyatt. I learned this “secret” from him: the key to effective to do lists is only including three significant tasks on your list in a given day. That’s right–three. My to do lists often had a couple dozen tasks on them before I went through Hyatt’s Free to Focus course. In that course he offers incredible ideas and actions for becoming more productive than ever. One of those actions is remembering that we can’t do several dozen things well in a given day. When our to do lists have dozens of tasks on them and we complete five or six, at the end of the day we will feel like failures even though we may have made significant progress or even completed an important goal.
The first time I heard him make that statement, I thought, “That’s right.” I nearly always felt like a failure at the end of a productive day, because my to do list didn’t seem to have a dent in it. The problem is our feelings of success and failure are often wrapped around the idea of finishing. If we finish the job we feel successful, but when we don’t finish we feel like failures. There’s so much that’s unhelpful and unhealthy about such an approach, as I know from decades of experiencing it. The most unhelpful aspect of getting halfway through a long to do list and feeling like a failure is it disregards that the day may have been extremely productive. For example, when I write a message for the weekend, put together a plan for a productive meeting for the next day and invest two to three hours in research for an upcoming workshop I’ll be leading that is a productive day. Yet, when my to do list had another ten or fifteen items on it that I didn’t even touch, I feel as if I failed.
What about you? How long are your to do lists? Another important question: Do your to do lists include tasks that are worthy of your efforts? Sometimes we clog our to do lists with insignificant tasks we can complete in fifteen or twenty minutes, simply because we want to have the sense of accomplishment that comes with checking an item off the list. As so many time management and life management experts remind us: we all need a to not do list, because one of the best uses of our time is to not do tasks that someone else could do, or that ought not to be done in the first place. Why not take some time today to consider whether you to do lists are helping you succeed or are contributing to your sense of failing? Why not ask yourself are the items on my to do list worthy of my pursuit? Do they contribute to the accomplishment of my major life/work goals? If the answer to those questions leaves you with a sense that you’re headed in the wrong direction, that will be time well invested, because you can make a course correction and get back on track. If, on the other hand, your answers tell you you’re already on track, then that’s time well invested as well.
Here’s to leading better by taking the time to develop to do lists that will foster your success and your completion of key goals over time–today!