5 Ways to Conquer the “To-Do” List mountain

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently and she was telling me about how complicated her life was. “I have a million things to do but no way to prioritize what to do first! I just see a massive pile of tasks and don’t know where to start.”

 

This happens a lot. This happens to me! I have had more than my share of “monumental tasks” that have looked impossible to complete and when I come up against this I found that there are a few methods that can help you conquer your task list. for sure one way to deal with this is to treat it like a mini project in of itself and you could apply my 7 Steps to Organizational success (Hyperlink). If that feels like too much and you’re looking to just simplify, even more, there are a few quick things that you can do;

 

1) Write it all down – For those of us who are to do list nerds it seems obvious, but As a converted to-do lister myself, I’ll be honest, there was a time where I didn’t actually like todo lists. I thought (rather brashly..I was in my 20’s what can I say) that I could, of course, hold all the things I had to get sorted out in my head and, naturally I could do it all. After I missed a series of different things I started trying to write everything down and when I did It not only made my tasks easier, I was able to chuck out the bigger ones so that they didn’t seem so stressful. I would HIGHLY recommend taking an hour or so out of your day and just write down all the things you feel like you have to get done. When I mean everything I mean EVERYTHING!!! Gotta pay your bills? Write it down. You have a big project that you want to get done? Write it down! You will be amazed when you sit down and dedicate a good chunk of time to writing down all the things you have to do get done (or think you have to get done) how many things pop into your head.

 

2) Go back again and write more – To-do lists are NEVER done in one sitting. I have found that one of the best things to flush out a good idea is to walk away from the task at hand. Partially because when you try working on something too much then your brain stops being able to produce good ideas, but also because literally walking away causes good blood flow which makes your brain work better. When you take a break (and that may be a day or two) from writing out all your to-dos I can almost guarantee that you will find at least one or two more things that you will want to throw on your Todo list. As you continue on this will become a habit and you will have more and more to-dos. This is not a bad thing, you just need to know how to manage them.

 

3) Look over your list and see what’s most important – This is where we have to separate the “to dos” and the “I wants”. We all want to run 15 KM’s in the morning and be spectacular looking and absolutely rock our jobs, but not all of the “I wants” are possible. Once you separate out the “I wants” you can then look at your actual to-do list and prioritize what needs to be done, what can be put off until later (yes this is actually a thing that works) and what needs to be done in order to get other stuff done. I find that when I am able to see all my tasks in one place I am able to mentally put them in the order that I think they need to be in.

 

4) Set dates for your tasks – The next critical step in conquering the Todo List mountain is chunking out your tasks so that you can’t look at your list and get instantly overwhelmed. The easiest and simplest way of doing this is giving every single task a due date. I like assigning my todo’s a date where I want make sure to get it done because it both A) gives me goals to strive for so that I won’t just say “oh I’ll do it next week” (although I will admit that does still occasionally happen) and B) It makes it so that my massive ToDo list isn’t so massive….this week. This week’s task list is five or six items long, as opposed to the todo list which regularly has thirty or forty items on it.

 

5) Make sure that the “easy ones” are spread out – As you look at your list, there will be a bunch of todos that, let’s be honest, you could knock out in an afternoon if you really put your mind to it. PLEASE DON’T! This may sound counter-intuitive but It’s really important to make sure that you spread out your easy tasks or “low hanging fruit”. After a while, if you only hand the more difficult tasks to take care of, it will make it that much harder to get anything done. Having easy tasks spread throughout makes it so that you can claim small victories along your journey. Doing this will give you a level of confidence knowing that you are getting something done.

 

We all have so many things to do and our time needs to be spent in the most efficient manner. Making a to-do list is an incredibly simple way to make sure that you both know everything that you have to do and also to make sure that you get it all done. Stay tuned, I’ll be putting up a post on Thursday going over my Favorite ToDo list app, which completely won me over as soon as I started using it.

 

 

Do you write out ToDo lists? Do you think you might Start?