Organised for success

It always strikes me when people develop long to-do lists. The list is growing and day is more successful the more items have been ticked off that list.

First of all, this is very black and white approach. How do you know if you progressed in the area that matters? Maybe you just ticked off ten most unimportant boxes on your list? You can’t judge how successful your day is if your list is not prioritised in a certain way.

Ask yourself a question: if I could only do one thing today, which one would have the biggest impact on my life, career, development? That’s already giving you a sense of importance. Yes, you need to prioritise if you want to stay productive and highly effective. As I mentioned before - activity doesn’t mean that you are progressing in any meaningful direction. Could be on the contrary - you are always avoiding the most difficult, brain-power consuming items on your list, by simply sorting out those of little importance.

By having a single to do list, you limit your ability to grow in all areas. It may be that you are always doing things that help your physique, but never get around to improving your CV.

Step no 1: CATEGORISE

In order to start planning and prioritising you need to know which areas you want to grow and develop in. It can be anything of high importance to you, but I don’t recommend having more than 4 categories. This will ensure that you always accomplish things that matter the most. To give you an example, my categories are: Career, Self-Development, University, Health and Look.

Step no 2: SET MEANINGFUL GOALS

How do you justify to your brain that you should do each day something that is uncomfortable, tiring and doesn’t necessarily feel pleasant? By setting meaningful goals, which in case of doubt, procrastination, laziness can help to bring you back on track.

Each category should have its own goal. If you can’t define a goal, for a category, maybe you should reconsider if you want to put an effort every day into something that doesn’t inspire you. For example: Career - I want to be have my own business by the age of 30, which brings me yearly income of £100,000. To make a goal more meaningful you can ask yourself most helpful self-coaching question ‘WHY?’. Why? So I can be flexible in my work, not having to spend 9 hours a day in the office, being able to spend more time with family and live a healthy life - having time to cook, workout, meditate.

Step no 3: PRIORITISE

Develop a 3-tier system which you can indicate highest, medium and lower importance of the tasks. I do it by P1, P2, P3 (P = priority). I don’t like High, Med, Low as it indicates that something on the list is not important (power of perception).

Always start your day with items that are of highest priority, this way you ensure that even if you don’t do anything anymore that day, you maximised your chances of progression. If you still have time, move to medium and then lower priority of each category.

Now, you have a reliable measure of success. If you didn’t complete any P1s - then probably you should not be happy about your progress. Completing P1 gives you ‘Bronze medal’, P1s and P2 - Silver, P1, P2, P3 - Gold. This way stop punishing yourself for ticking only three boxes of your to do list, by knowing their relative importance.

Step no 4*: 1 KEY LEARNING A DAY

If you want to progress in each category, you probably need to have some reflections and learning each day. I call that ‘one gold nugget a day’. Every day I try to put down a key learning or reflection of that category. It can be something simple as ‘Don’t tell your boss that he is wrong, it may backlash’ or ‘I work best when put into high pressure situations’.

How do you put all that in practice?

Here is very simple way of systematising it, feel free to download the below template - and use it daily or create your own. Each week just copy and paste it to new document and clear data. If you haven’t accomplished something it can stay for next week. Remember to be as specific as possible about the items you put in the grid.

You can either set your prioritises for a work week or full week. From my experience if you stay highly productive during the week, somewhere along Silver/Gold, you can take a weekend off!

It can be as simple as this one:

Download template here:

Prioritsed to-do list.docx

Download DOCX • 17KB

Now take your long to-do list and populate the grid! After you get used to it, it will take you as much as 10 minutes to plan a week.

Enjoy!