Drawing up a list of tasks is an effective way to remain productive. However, if you start every morning with planning, but there is no clarity, you continue to be distracted and forget about the important, you may make one of the common mistakes.
1. Keep the list in your head
It sounds obvious, but you can’t do without this point: if you do not write down the task, it is likely that you will simply forget about it. But checking with a list, paper or electronic, you can hold your hand on the pulse and follow the plan.
2. Make items that you cannot execute
“Be honest with yourself: if you know that your hands do not reach the task, you should not bring it to your list, otherwise you will only feel an injection of conscience and you will be disappointed in yourself,” the expert on the time management of Laura Vanderkams explains.
David Allen’s productivity expert agrees with his colleague and advises to conduct a separate list of large -scale tasks for which it would be good to take up once. So you will not forget about these plans and proceed to their implementation when resources appear on it – financial, temporary and emotional.
3. Include too many tasks in the list
“The secret is to make the list as short as possible: only a few points with clearly arranged priorities are better than an endless“ sheet ”, which you can’t master anyway,” Vanderchi believes. – Do not try to accommodate all the things that you need or which you would like to do. Three to five tasks per day will be enough;cases on which the deadlines are not settled can be transferred to other days “.
“We often overestimate what is in time in the day, and we underestimate how much we can do in a
longer perspective,” recalls the creator and leading podcast about productivity “productive conversation”.
4. Do not break large projects into small tasks
“When we divide a large project into small and executable subtasks, we are ceased to constrain the fear of global and unknown, we can take the first steps and track our progress,” explains the coach according to Grace Marshall productivity. – The thing is that, closing even the smallest task, we get our portion of dopamine, and this helps us to move on. It’s like with a computer game: we pass its level behind the level, solving the problems alternately “.
5. Formulating the tasks is blurred
Vardi advises to prescribe each task as specifically as possible: for example, not just “send an e-mail to client n.”, And” Send the client n. Actual project data “.
“Imagine that you have to transfer your list of tasks to a colleague. How do you describe each in order to simplify his work as much as possible? Your “colleague” in this case – you are in the future. So make yourself such a gift in the form of clear instructions, without forcing yourself to remember and guess what exactly you meant “.
6. Use your list of incoming messages as a list of cases
In this case, there is a great risk of stagnation and rake the mail all day, pushing the implementation of important cases for later. “Letters are likely to come all day, and if you are distracted by each, everything else will simply not remain for everything else,” explains Grace Marshall. “When drawing up a plan for the day, think about your global goals and how every task will bring you closer to their achievement.”.
7. Do not lay time for rest
According to the psychologist Lee Chembers, to include a five -minute respiratory practice and/or walk around the house in your list of affairs is no less important than working tasks. “It is important to give yourself the opportunity to relax, reboot and make up for energy deficit – it is extremely difficult to remain productive without this: errors are inevitable, and burnout is possible in the long term”.
8. Enter tiny tasks just for the pleasure of delete them
As we have already said, the fulfillment of the task charges us with a dofamine and gives us the feeling that we have achieved something, but this does not mean that it is worth including a lot of unimportant and insignificant trifles in our list of affairs.
“The more tasks, the more time it takes to arrange priorities. In addition, it may seem to us that we managed a lot of things, while in fact we did nothing special, ”Chambers explains.
Thus, the tasks that we must perform day a day (for example, taking vitamins), the expert advises to assemble a separate list and hang it in a prominent place.
