Are you using "TODO Lists"? A small change will help you to accomplish it! 🤘🐱
I think that productivity is one of the most important things when working on a new venture.
One of the tools we are all using is - To-Do lists.
However, most of us don't complete those tasks on time.
Yeah - Its happen to all of us! You're not alone!
Before I'm revealing the solution, let's talk about the cause.
Have you ever found yourself working the whole day but not having significant progress? That because we are postponing hard tasks that require hard thinking or that take a long time to accomplish.
We will postpone those tasks, and instead, we will work on the easy tasks that will make us feel busy but don't help our venture to have major progress.
So what is the solution?
A Calendar!
Have you written an outstanding Todo list for tomorrow?
Great! Now open your calendar and give a time slot for each task.
Giving time for each task help, you do all your tasks on time.
It's a small change with a huge impact!
Go ahead and try it - you got nothing to lose... You already don't accomplish your Todo List. 😂
Agree? Disagree?
Go ahead a share your thought in the comments. 🙏
I wrote about timeboxing on Twitter a while back. It really works!
100% agree about timeboxing! It's so simple but keeps me on task. I actually made a timeboxing web app - since you're a timeboxing fan too, would be very interested to hear your thoughts if you have a second: www.llamalife.co
I tried that once and figured for me personally that does not work well. When you work on your own this can be really good but you have to have the discipline and spirit. When you work from home and have kids or when you work with other people that you may depend on or have to collaborate with your time table gets always skewed a bit.
What I came up with so far is just having a recurring list of TODOs that I have to do during any given day. Stupid example, I have a reminder to brush my teeth. You got this right. I am not doing it on time when the reminder pops up because for some reason dinner was late this day. So the checkbox is put once I can get after it.
Thanks for sharing!
Are you familiar with the MIT principle?
I am not! Teach me master. <3
Haha, I wish I was a master. I'm struggling my self managing my tasks.
MIT stands for "Most Important Thing".
Researchers have shown that the most effective hours of the day are the two first ones.
SO if you started your day at 10 am you should devote the next two hours for the MIT - The most important task on your TODO list.
Researchers should have studied me. My first two hours are LoFi until I have eaten. Doing intermittent fasting. I noticed my most productive hours are those I make a decision for. I can make a call and just grind through it madnessing myself into flow until I lose track of time. And somehow creativity floods my brain in the night.
Tried doing that (planning days with time slots), but couldn't really commit as things would take longer/shorter than planned, and I had to juggle calendar which was distracting from actual work. Or I would work on A instead of having B written in calendar.
What I do now is a strategic high level approach (using Trello so I just jot a note on card, and move cards between appropriate lists):
One trick that helped me commit to self-management after a few failed efforts is that when I am done with a task, I put it in a "DONE" list so that at end of month/week I can reflect on past work - and I can also catch myself procrastinating if DONE isn't growing.
I use trello calendar widget to get quick overview of upcoming deadlines. One note is those deadlines are arbitrary way of making me not postpone the task for too long.
It could be a good idea, but I tend to micromanage myself less, and todo lists work ok for me. One thing that has also worked for me is to break down bigger/difficult tasks into multiple subtasks (one todo item for each subtask), so now what I accomplish depends on how good my todo list is.
But thanks for sharing!
Great method! What tool are you using ?
Ohh I just use a notepad. I usually create list in the morning and run through it during the day.
I really like this idea in theory. In practice though I seem to end up with my schedule slipping because of something unexpected, then feeling like I'm behind schedule all day.
Now I'm using a sort of hybrid, where I write out my todos each day and assign them an estimated duration, with a max of 4 hrs work per day. When I start a task, I set a timer and try finish it in that amount of time.
Inevitably other things come up or take longer than expected, and those tasks fill out the rest of the day, but it feels good to have everything checked off at the end of the day.
I understand the difficulty. Maybe you should try to save time only for your MIT (most important task)