At the end of each day my to do list is never done and I feel dreadful about myself/situation.
Even though I have a huge to do list I still waste time surfing the internet!
I constantly worry I haven’t completed the most important things on my list.
Sound familiar?!
I once heard a sentence which changed everything for me, ‘successful people don’t make to do lists, they schedule things’. To be honest, I heard it a few times before I really thought about what it meant.
To be honest, when I was starting out in my career, ‘to do list’ were fine. After all, I had a boss to keep me on track and hold me accountable. Probably my biggest jump was when I first became a manager and suddenly, I had 4 to do lists to manage. I struggled and felt like I was getting paid just a little more money for a lot more work. I began micro managing and working long hours. Jump forward to today when I manage several clients and teams in different organisations at one time. I couldn’t do that, not even headspace wise, without learning to plan and block time for specific time bounded work.
Planning your week:
Let’s start small, just one week!
- Plan your upcoming work week, including how you spend your time outside of work. Plan in advance for you down time, your fun time, all the hours you will sleep.
- Review your plan, it should outcome based.What’s the output of the piece of work?
- Schedule your success. Include time to practice.
- Stick to your plan, just for one week. Which means, if your plan says one hour working on something, it’s one hour only! Head down, focus for one hour!
- Show up, even if you don’t do the work. This means, if you plan to go to the gym for an hour but don’t fancy it, go to the gym anyway (because you planned to) and sit there for an hour.
- Think about how you transition from one piece of work to another. Do you need a break, how long is the break, is it a walk around the office, make a cuppa (my fav!), or listen to a song before moving on to the next times piece of work. Schedule these transitions and detail them.
Review:
At the end of each day, write down how you spend your time. I got used to this as I needed to account for each hour of my time with client work, but, even if you’ve got just one employer, pretend you have to account for your day. This alone usually makes you more productive but having this report is great data. One column of your plan, one column of what you actually did. This helps you plan going forward as you’ll be aware how long it really takes to complete recurring tasks but also allows you to be self accountable to your plan.
Where necessary, ask others to review your performance against plan with you so you have external accountability. I don’t recommend a spouse, but perhaps get a friend to do the same in their work and become accountability buddies.
Amend only after one week. Evaluate, what went well and what could be better. Plan again for the next week with these adjustments until you get to know how you work and understand your working mind better.
Outcome:
When I started planning my time, a few things happened:
1) My to do list diminished quicker than ever before
2) By planning the transitions I started creating fun rewards for myself so always had light of the end of the tunnel if it was a piece of work I wasn’t enjoying.
3) The less enjoyable tasks didn’t seem to bother me as much because I knew they were only for a set period of time.
4) I learnt a task roaming around my head makes me feel anxious, a task on a to do list makes me feel dread but scheduled with a little treat made it possible.
5) A massive sense of achievement (smugness even?!) for getting work completed ahead of time
6) Congruent – feeling I was tackling everything in my life at the same level
7) More time – I wasn’t spending time at weekends quickly filling in my car tax form as I was rushing out to meet friends! I even used transition periods to tackle the odd piece of life admin so fun time was exclusively fun time!