This week, what should be going on your to-do list and what should not.

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Episode 187

Hello and welcome to episode 187 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So, what exactly should you be putting on your to-do list? This might seem an obvious answer, but I can tell you it is not. 

When you put a lot of the wrong things into a task manager, you will become overwhelmed with tasks you have no intention of doing because they mean nothing to you and they’ve been hanging around in there for years. 

This week, I will explain what should be in there and what you should not be putting in there.

Now before we go any further, over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a number of videos over on my YouTube channel around the difficult subject of prioritisation. It can be very hard to pick the right things to work on when there is so much being thrown at us. 

One part of your life that should always be a priority is your goals. If you are not working on your goals, you’ll be unconsciously working on someone else’s goals. That could be your boss’s or the shareholders of the company you work for and that is never going to work for you long-term

Now, as we enter the post-pandemic world, would be a great time to re-evaluate your goals, ensure they are clear, that you have a strong, personal reason for achieving them and a definite action plan. And to help you with that, I have completely updated my Time And Life Mastery course

The 2021 edition of Time And Life Mastery will not only show you how to turn your goals (and dreams) into reality, it will also get you to think deeper about what you want and give you the strategy to make sure you have the time to work on them every day using the Time Sector System.

Don’t get left behind, start today and build your goals into the heart of your daily to-do list. Joining the course now will give you an early-bird discount of 20%. 

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Debbie. Debbie asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed in your YouTube videos that you don’t have many tasks on your to-do list. I have hundreds of tasks and I can’t help feeling I am doing something wrong. Is there a reason why you don’t put many tasks in there? 

Hi Debbie, Thank you for your question. Your task list is all about elimination, not accumulation and I feel that is where so many people go wrong. 

The biggest mistake I see people making is putting tasks into their task manager that should not be there. Now, I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a task manager does. 

Let me explain it this way. Your task manager is there to trigger you to do the things that need doing. For instance, complete a presentation file, work on a client proposal or prepare for a management meeting. It is not there for individual follow-ups, email replies and phone calls. 

Now, I can hear expressions of outrage as I say that but hear me out. 

Let me take emails as an example. Email comes into your email app’s inbox. And inside your email app, you have space to create folders to hold your important emails. In a way, your email app is a to-do list itself. You can create a folder called “action this day” for any email that requires action (replying, reading and reviewing or acting on). If you send your actionable email to your task manager you have just duplicated yourself. Now you have a task in two places. 

The same goes for following up prospects. In this case, most companies have some form of CRM—customer relationship manager—and all the prospects or customers that need following up are held in there. These CRMs are purpose-built for this job. If you also create tasks reminding you to follow up with Miss Smith and Mr Jones, you’ve just duplicated yourself. 

The same goes for Slack and Teams messages. You don’t need to send all the messages that need replies to your task manager. 

Instead, you could create single recurring tasks that remind you to clear your actionable emails, reply to your messages and check for customers that need following up. That’s three tasks instead of thirty in your tasks manager. After all, each of those tasks is compartments of work. 

If you compartmentalise those tasks so when you work on email, your work on email, when you work on following up clients and prospects you work on doing follow-ups, you are going to be less likely to procrastinate or be distracted. 

You see, the problem with throwing everything into your task manager is you create a monster. And once it becomes a monster, you stop using your task manager and, of course, when that happens what’s the point of having a task manager?

For your task manager to be effective it must be clean and tight and that means whatever you put in there must be meaningful and be a genuine task. Having tasks reminding you to read a book will be ignored. You don’t need a task manager reminding you to read a book. You just need to keep the book in the place you would normally read a book. You might read for twenty minutes first thing in the morning, or lunchtime or just before you go to bed. Reading is a habit, not something you should need reminding about. 

I mean, you don’t need a reminder to tell you to eat, so why would you need a reminder to feed your brain? 

For those of you who have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or taken my Time Sector course, you already know that the details of a project need to be kept outside your task manager. Your task manager is a terrible project manager. In Getting Things Done, you have project support folders that contain all the work that needs doing on a given project. The only thing you have in your task manager is the next action. Your project plans, future tasks and milestones are in your project support materials.

The same goes with the Time Sector System. The only items in your task manager are the items related to what you will be working on this week. All the details of your projects are kept in your notes app—a modern-day version of project support folders. 

Unless you are working on a project that you have done many times before, there is no way you can guess accurately what all your next actions will be. There are too many unknowns. 

I remember when I bought a car last year, I made a list of all the things I thought I would need to do after buying the car several months before I actually bought the car. When it came to buying the car around 80% of the things on that list were not necessary. In fact, the only thing I remember I did need to do was get my sunglasses lenses changed to prescription lenses. 

The dealership I bought the car from anticipated what was needed and included everything in the package. Sadly they didn’t anticipate my poor eyesight. In the end the list I spent hours developing was a complete waste of time. 

Now there are things that you may need reminders for and for those you create a folder called “routines”. These are the little things that you would forget if you didn’t get a little nudge. The common examples might be to take the garbage out or pay your bills. These little nudges just pop up at the bottom of your daily list when they are due. 

The goal with any task manager is to eliminate not accumulate. The less you put in there, the more effective your task list will be. To achieve this, you want to be very strict about what gets into your system. In a way, when you process is the first filter. 

I collect around ten to fifteen tasks a day in my inbox. Of those around five to eight will manage to get through my processing filter. My first question when I process a task is: Does this task really have to be done? 

Many of these tasks are likely to be done without getting into my system. For instance, today, I received a payment from one of my English students. They require a receipt for that payment so I added the task “Do student’s receipt” to my inbox. When I got back to my desk later, I saw that and as the task was a two-minute task, I did it straight away. No point in letting a simple task like that get into my system. 

There’s a psychological thing going on here. If you start the day with a list that goes off your screen you are going to immediately feel anxious. As you scroll down the list that anxiousness will only increase. 

Instead, you want to start your day with a list that looks doable and contains tasks you know must be done that day. You want to look forward to reviewing your list for the day so you can get started feeling confident. That’s the goal. 

If you begin the day rescheduling all the tasks you didn’t do yesterday and then try to figure out what are the most important tasks for that day, you are never going to feel good about the day, are you? 

Your planning needs to be done the evening before. Any rescheduling should be done then not at the beginning of the next day. Starting your day like that just destroys your day. 

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of those ten minutes at the end of the day to clean up and plan the next day. Not doing that, will result in you regularly having to reset your system and that always take far too long. You don’t have time for that, but you can find ten minutes at the end of the day—seriously if you cannot find ten minutes at the end of your day you have much more serious problems than your productivity.

So there you go, Debbie. It really comes down to first compartmentalising your work. Project work, communications, follow-ups, and all your other work. Use natural inboxes such as your email inbox and process those into folders for action. All you need then is a simple task in your task manager to remind you to clear those folders. 

I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. 

Thank you to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.