Who actually likes to feel out of control at work?
Who likes to feel continually behind on their workload?
Who likes to feel overwhelmed?
At a guess, I would say not many of us. But by the same token, a lot of us have felt this way at some point – probably in the recent past – and that will be down to how we manage our incoming work and decide when we are going to do it.
With that in mind, this article aims to help you reverse, reduce or permanently remove from your work life those potentially damaging instances of feeling submerged – thereby restoring some sense of balance to your daily activities.
We are going to do this by reframing the way we think about, and work with, that humble aide-memoire, the to-do list.
On their last working day before they go on holiday, most people typically create to-do lists. They do so to ensure that they leave no stone unturned while handing over, as well as for prioritising, planning and staying focused and motivated before they go off.
People like lists because they are quick and simple to create. But they don’t seem to like them enough to do them every day.
This is strange, because there are very few work days indeed where you would actively want to leave things out – or where you couldn’t be bothered to prioritise and plan your tasks, or organise incoming requests to keep yourself focused and motivated. Under those circumstances, everything around you would just fall over, wouldn't it?
So, why don’t people always create to-do lists?
Simply because the formats and approaches that the majority of us apply to our lists don’t work. I would like to explain why that is the case, and provide you with two alternative – and far more effective – solutions:
If you look at a selection of to-do lists written by different people, you will frequently discover that…
They often fail to indicate an order of importance for the tasks, or clarify in a systematic way which item should be done first, second, third, fourth and so on.
For example, any quick time-outs to grab tea, coffee or water, go to the toilet, or move and stretch, or longer spells of downtime for lunch.
These are now an integral part of every worker’s daily life. Interruptions and distractions are those unexpected items that require your attention each and every day – urgent or important requests that may arrive via email, text, a phone call or people simply turning up at your desk.
Or, indeed, whatever messaging systems you use. I’m not talking here about doing the work that’s contained in the email, or the request outlined in the text message. I mean just sorting through the ones you receive each day.
For example, Item #1 – 45 mins, Item #2 – 20 mins, Item #3 – 75 mins, Item #4 – 30 mins, and so on. By failing to include such allocations, to-do lists can end up negatively impacting on planning for today, the next day… or even the next week.
To get that distinction straight, compare the following pieces of work: i) ‘Redesign the company website’ and ii) ‘Decide what we do and don’t like about our home page’. The first is a project, containing many tasks, while the second is simply a task.
If people don’t prioritise (see point 1), they can be indecisive or easily knocked off course during the day. Worst still, other people indirectly end up prioritising for them or they spend their entire day asking ‘What shall I do next?’.
That’s a dangerous road to go down, because disorganised people will often then make decisions emotionally, or continue to allow other people to decide for them, and so the whole indecision problem cascades.
If you fail to address points 2, 3 and 4, not only does your list become ridiculously overambitious – because you’ve ignored something in the region of three hours of activities –it also won’t give you the flexibility to respond to the inevitable requests at short notice.
On to point 5: by not estimating how long each item will take, you do not have a way of checking how realistic your plan is. As a result, you will fail to improve your forecasting skills. That means expectations and expectation-setting are often inaccurate, forming a perfect breeding ground for undesirable stress and pressure.
And finally point 6: if you place projects on a to-do list, you are likely to find at the end of the day that the number of items on your list has in fact grown. Which isn’t necessarily the warmest, fuzziest feeling to have when you’ve worked flat out all day.
This is why people give up on to-do lists: they are not fit for purpose. People tire of seeing their lists continually grow because they are carrying over items from one list to the next, day in, day out. So, here are two more effective alternatives:
On a 40:60 list, before you do anything else, you write off, in advance, 40% of your working day to the requirements of points 2, 3 and 4. So you only plan or prioritise the remaining 60% of your time.
That way, you have already accounted for a reasonable chunk of time that you already know will be devoted to managing email, dealing with interruptions and distractions, and going on breaks.
This simple solution takes minutes to implement but will make your daily plans much more realistic and achievable.
If you want something a little more detailed, the Today List format will do the trick – and you can find a template of it here.
Essentially, it encourages you to break down your day into ‘recurring activities’ – ie, those you must attend to on a daily basis, such as managing emails – and ‘other activities’, which relate to tasks that are part and parcel of project work.
I’d encourage you to estimate the time you need against each activity and note down the actual time it took. You will grow increasingly accurate at these estimates as time goes on, further enhancing your daily planning.
Remember: if you don’t plan your time, there are always plenty of other people willing to step in every day to do that job for you!
Neil Massa is a specialist in employee productivity and specifically time management in the digital age. He is co-founder of Smarter Not Harder, a consulting, training and coaching services provider. Other articles in this series can be found here and here.