Can’t fall asleep at night because you keep going through your list of to-dos in your head to make sure you won’t forget anything? Finding your to-do list so intimidating that you are paralysed and procrastinating? Don’t fret, there is a way to create a to-do list that get things done.

As a time management coach, I have observed that people who struggle to complete their to-dos fall into 3 main categories:

1. People who don’t have a to-do list and rely on their memory.
2. People with a master to-do list with pages and pages of to-dos.
3. People with multiple to-do lists: part of it in their diary, or a special notebook, or an App on their phone, or a combination of the 3, the rest on lose sheets of paper, post-its, back of envelopes etc.

Whichever the category they belong to, they face similar consequences: tasks are not completed on time or are completely forgotten. They don’t feel productive as time and energy are not necessarily spent on what is important, people around them being at home or at work resent them for not doing what they were supposed to do, etc. On an emotional level, they feel stressed, overwhelmed and quite often suffer from low self-esteem.

Hmmm… so how?

Well the only way to manage your to-dos is to have one single and consistent location where you capture all your to-dos. Ideally it should be your diary so that you can associate a day and time to each of your to-dos.

But what qualifies as a to-do?

Well anything that takes time to get done. But it has to be specific. It isn’t a project that happens in multiple steps over a period of time e.g. organise your company annual retreat. It can be either internally generated (your own ideas) or externally requested (email, meeting, other people’s requests etc.).

How to increase my chances to do what’s on my to-do list?

• Your to-dos need to start with an action verb such as call, write, review, plan, ask, read, etc.  Writing “holidays” is not specific enough, you need to rephrase it as “book tickets for Bangkok” or “source a travel guide for Bangkok” etc., so that you don’t have to figure out what it is that you have to do. “Remember to…”, “don’t forget to…” do not qualify as a to-do!
• It has to come with a time estimate so that you can evaluate whether your workload is realistic every single day. The more specific you are, the easier it is to estimate how long a task will take.
• Ideally it should be scheduled directly into your diary. To quote time management guru Julie Morgenstern, “A task that is not connected to a “when” does not get done”.

So how do I start?

Gather all your to-dos (in whatever form they currently come), your diary and your weekly schedule. Pick up one to-do at a time and ask yourself the following questions:

• What exactly needs to be done? Remember to use an action verb.
• How long do I estimate it is going to take?
• Where does this task belong into my weekly schedule?
• What is the deadline for this task?
• Which particular date should I do this?

Once you have added the to-do onto your list, get rid of the paper if you can. Otherwise file it.

The idea is for you to plan days with a realistic workload so that you feel productive and with a sense of achievement.  And for those days when you have more to do than time available, in my next article I will introduce the concept of the 4D’s to help you streamline your workload.

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