The Never Ending To Do List
Hi friends! Welcome to this week’s blog! I’m so glad you are here with us today. Let’s talk about this never-ending to do list. How many of you have had the scenario where you are driving yourself crazy because you’re tasks seem never-ending? Do you have anxiety over it? Do you sometimes want to just give up?
I find the biggest issue with this dilemma is that it’s all in our heads. Yes, you may have tons of things to do, but the things on your list should not be giving you anxiety. You should not be stressing over this. There may be days where you have to pull an all-nighter (my days in University come to mind, but that was mostly because I procrastinated and wasn’t smart about using my time).
There are a couple of issues here. First, you have a lot to do. That’s most people; you are not alone. It’s how you manage your time that determines:
How much you get done
How efficient you are
How you react (i.e. stress, anxiety)
Personally, I have a daily to do list that never ends. What I don’t finish the current days work, I move remaining tasks over to the next day or the next week. The trick is to constantly evaluate what is important or not.
This is what I use to evaluate my tasks:
The Eisenhower Matrix
My first step, always, is to start with a brain dump. Another term for this is termed by Ryder Carroll (the first time I’ve heard of this concept was when I read his book, ‘The Bullet Journal Method’). It’s called The Mental Inventory. You have three basic categories:
Working on
Should be working on
Want to be working on
The concept begins by listing out absolutely everything on your mind, or everything that you need to get done. If you begin using a general brain dump, you can start by simply making a single list on paper and then filling in the categories later. If you use the Eisenhower matrix as shown above, you need to determine the importance and urgency of every single one of your tasks.
When you go to make your daily to do list, you want to start on the tasks or projects that are important and urgent. These potentially do not have to be crammed into one day. You might be able to schedule them over the course of a week. However, these need to be done first (and potentially quickly).
Second come the important, but not urgent tasks. These should be put into your calendar, either scheduled for upcoming dates or put on a general monthly to do list or inbox. It’s important that you do them, but perhaps they can wait until later.
Third are the urgent, but not important tasks. The general consensus is that you should delegate these tasks. Personally, I don’t have extra money to hire people to help me with my work. My husband works out of town, so I am alone most of the time and I need to still deal with these tasks. These are the things I do when I have extra time.
The fourth quadrant are items that are not urgent, nor important. People suggest to cross these tasks off your list and delete them. However, these are some of the things I love to do in my spare time. I always prioritize these when I know I need relaxation time, or quiet time. Sometimes I want to play with stickers, but it doesn’t fall into any of the other categories, but it makes me happy and happiness sometimes trumps my other tasks. If you already have a good grasp on prioritizing the important tasks, then it’s okay to let yourself have some quiet, alone time. You should always schedule time for self care, and hobbies you enjoy. In the long run, relaxation time makes you more efficient. You need to keep your cup filled before you can dole out energy on other things.
There are a few things that you should have in place before you begin:
Plan (may sound obvious, but in order to schedule and plan you actually need to write things down).
Keep distractions to a minimum while you are doing focus work.
Plan the night before so you can get a head start on work (and you won’t get distracted as easily).
If you want to see other tips about planning, I have blogs on organization, productivity and planner tips.
Thanks for reading, and we will see you next week!
🧡 SAN
