I use To Do lists, and all the successful people I’ve ever met use them too. The reason is they really work.
A great example of their effectiveness comes from Charles Schwab, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company in the 1930s. He hired a time management consultant called Ivy Lee to shadow him for two weeks and then advise him how he could improve his business. The report, when it came, consisted of just three recommendations:
- Make a list of ‘Things to Do’ every day
- Prioritize everything on that list
- Tackle things in order of decreasing payoff
‘Don’t pay me now,’ said Ivy Lee, knowing that this succinct advice was a far cry from the usual 100-page reports Schwab received. ‘Just put my advice into practice for a month and then pay me what it is worth to you.’
The story goes that one month later, Schwab sent Ivy Lee a cheque for $25,000 – an incredible sum of money in those days. His company went on to become the largest independent steel producer in the world, and in later life he declared that this was the most valuable piece of business advice he had ever received.
I’m a pen and paper To Do lister myself, and keep them all together in a book, tearing out pages as the lists are completed. But if you prefer to use technology, Life Hacker recently conducted a poll to find the Top Five To Do List Managers, and the results were published today. The most popular at the moment are Astrid, Remember the Milk, Any.Do, Toodledo and Wunderlist.
Of course, as Charles Schwab discovered, prioritized To Do lists are by far the most effective, so you will need some method of doing this. Most people make the mistake of tackling low priority tasks first because they are so much easier to do, but this generally leads only to insignificant achievements. The 80/20 Pareto principle shows that we get 80% of our results from 20% of our efforts, so when you give top priority to the 20% ‘must do’ items on your daily list, then a lot of the other 80% melts into insignificance.
Some people like to use coloured highlighters to identify the most important tasks. I prefer the simple ABCDE system that Brian Tracy explains in his timeless book, Eat That Frog:
A tasks bring you the greatest benefits when completed, or cause you to face the direst consequences if you don’t. They are usually time sensitive, so as well as marking each high priority item on your To Do with an ‘A’ , it’s also a good idea to put them on your calendar too.
B tasks may cause inconvenience to yourself or others if you don’t do them, but life will go on. The best ‘B’ tasks are those that assist the completion of ‘A’ tasks in some way.
C tasks are a luxury. They are nice to do if you have time, but really of little or no importance in the greater scheme of things.
D tasks are ones you don’t need to do at all. You can delegate them to someone else.
E tasks are those that may have once seemed essential but you have procrastinated so long that the time for them has passed, or tasks that you have performed out of obligation for a long time and now need to extricate yourself from doing them any more.
It’s clear from this that ‘A’ tasks are the most worthwhile, and even these need prioritizing in order of importance, perhaps using Tracy’s A1, A2, A3 system, although I prefer underlining and asterisks myself.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that all ‘A’ tasks are work related. Top of your list today could well be spending quality time with loved ones instead of sitting at your computer reading this, in which case, what you are doing now is a ‘B’ task to assist in the completion of an ‘A’ priority rather than a ‘C’ task, which most internet surfing is.
Be mindful, too, that importances are not always what they seem. Destiny can sometimes throw curved balls, and what your logical mind may perceive as being a waste of time could in fact turn out to be a huge missed opportunity if not pursued. Some people rely on gut feelings, hunches or intuition to guide them in this, which can be helpful to a certain level, but the best navigation by far comes from developing and using higher discernment.
When you tune into great leaders, they don’t make decisions based on feelings but through using awakened subtle body structures above the head. We all have the ability to develop this level of perception if we choose to, and it’s both challenging and rewarding to do so. If you meet or become such a person, you’ll discover one thing for sure – their To Do lists are mostly ‘A’ tasks, and they make sure they get them done!
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Copyright © Karen Kingston 2013