5 Methods to List Your Tasks

Over the past few weeks, I have gone through some of the 7 steps to Organize your Digital life. Today’s post is about the best ways to List your Tasks. Now that you have your destination in mind (if not in sight) you have to start figuring out how to get from here to there. I dislike when people use the phrase “going from A to B” because it implies that the journey is a straight line that will be simple. Most of the time any project is more like going from point A to point AJF (For those of you not familiar with Excel after Columns A to Z happen it goes to AA, AB, AC Etc. until you get to three letters).

The best way to deal with this is to list all of the tasks that you have to do (or that you think you have to do) to complete your project. The way that I like to do it is to list out all of the tasks that I think that I have to do. There doesn’t have to be a particular order to them, that comes later. All you need to do is sit down for about ten to fifteen minutes and think of all the things you have to do.

1. Make an actual list – The first thing when listing your tasks is to make a list (No I’m not kidding). When facing a monumental project trying to hold all the jobs in your head can be overwhelming, so writing them down can make it so that A) you have all the tasks in front of you and B) It flushes out other tasks that you might not have thought of initially. It’s important because when you write down your tasks what happens is your project become much less theoretical and much more real. When I have had massive projects in the past, I have had to write everything down so that (if nothing else) I could get it straight in my head. Another benefit of making a list is that it’s a great way to calm yourself down from what may be an overwhelming project. Sometimes when I have many things on my to-do list I have no idea where to start so writing it down is the first step in creating an order for my tasks
2. Go over it and over it and over it – I have VERY RARELY written down my jobs in one sitting and had the final list in front of me. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours, sometimes a couple of weeks! I have had some projects when I’ve written my list and then a month later come up with something that needs to be added to the list. There is also the fact that there will be times when your project changes and you have to adjust your list to make sure that your objectives and tasks are keeping up with where your project is going.
3. Don’t be afraid to add to it – The worst organizational mistake to make is to think that a Task list is “done”. I want to differentiate between “done” and “Complete” here as they are two different things. Completing a task means that you do not need to work on it anymore, whereas your to-do list for a project is never really done. That being said I had added to my tasks records from some of my previous projects when they were less than two weeks from completion. It’s important to make sure that your task list is something that can be modified or added to because you might be halfway through a project and see tasks that may not have been within the scope of the project when you started, but are now.
4. Make your list organic – When you first make your task list, I would imagine the first few things on your to-do list will be the first few things on your mind. This is a great place to start because like the branches of a tree you will get a new idea of things to do because of the first few things. This is a good thing. Partly because I’ve never seen anyone think of everything to be done on the first go, but also because it will allow you to think of different things when you let your mind think of what needs to happen next.
5. Organize by type – now that you have all (or most) of your tasks on a list. It’s now time to take a real hard look at your whole list. Look for things that seem to go well together or which go after one another. It’s an important step to organize your task list because It’s another way that you can flush out tasks that you may have missed on your first go. Also, chunking out the long list of jobs into smaller groups makes them less daunting.

Listing your tasks is an excellent exercise in a project to Organize your Digital Life because while setting your destination is good, knowing how to get there is better. It’s a quick and simple way to get everything out in the open which makes organizing what you have to do a lot simpler. If everything is out in the open (or more to the point out of your head and on a list), then It’s much easier to visualize what you need to do, and what needs to get done first.

How do you List your tasks?

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