How to manage to do list

How to create an effective to-do list

Tasks come from every direction—your boss CC’ing you on an email, a coworker asking for feedback on a report, or even your cat jumping on your lap meowing to be fed.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of what you need to do.

Forgetting something important like a key detail can be problematic. It can lead to missed deadlines and unhappy clients (and cats).

That’s where a to-do list comes in.

Keeping a great to-do list helps you organize, prioritize your tasks, and plan out projects. Chances are you’ve made a list to help with things like grocery shopping, planning a backyard BBQ, or maybe the tasks you must complete at work today.

But how can you create an effective to-do list that helps you get more work done?

What is a to-do list?

A to do list is a list of tasks that contains everything you need to complete. It ensures you have everything written down in one place so you don’t forget anything important.

These lists don’t have to be that complicated. You can use a Post-It note or even a piece of scrap paper to write down your tasks.

Business examples can include writing a report, booking flights for a work trip, following up with a lead, etc.

To-do lists tend to be very personal, as each of us has our own way of making them and how we list out priorities. A famous example is this to-do list from singer Johnny Cash:

More modern solutions include using a to-do list or note taking app like monday.com—enabling whole teams to manage personal tasks and work items. These platforms also come with collaboration features that allow you to see what the team tasks are, give notes, and assign responsibilities.

Here’s an example of how remote teams use monday.com to manage their work:

Now let’s look at why it’s important to create a to-do list.

What are the benefits of a to-do list?

So why does creating a to-do list matter and why should it be more of a priority?

The short answer is that a good to-do list increases your productivity.

Without a plan to manage your work, you’ll end up reacting to tasks that others put on your plate. This can leave you feeling overwhelmed and drained as it means you’ll have to shift your schedule around to get to your own work.

Creating a to-do list can prevent that from happening. It lets you set your priorities ahead of time, so you can get to your daily tasks first.

Here are a few other benefits of creating to-do lists.

Organizes your work

Our working or short-term memory is extremely limited. As far back as 1956, psychologists found that the average person can hold just 7 items (plus or minus 2) in their head at a time.

Trying to remember all your daily tasks and details for each just isn’t feasible. It only makes you more likely to forget or mix important details up (“I thought that was due next week!”).

The most important reason for creating a to-do list is it helps you organize and keep track of the things you need to get done.

Instead of wondering, “What do I need to do today?” You can simply look at your list of unfinished tasks and see a clear outline of what you need to do.

Keeps you focused

Multitasking or switching between tasks just doesn’t work. While it may seem like you’re getting more work done, studies show that multitasking has a negative impact on productivity.

Multitasking means that your attention is divided and you’re not fully focused on a task. A study from researchers at the University of California, Irvine found that interrupted work leads to more stress and higher frustration.

The other bad news is it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to a task after getting interrupted. Those small distractions can add up over the course of a workday.

Keeping a to-do list can help you stay focused on a task and establish flow—the feeling of being fully immersed in your work.

Helps you prioritize

Time is your most valuable asset. But distractions like incoming emails and notifications take you away from productive work.

Keeping a to-do list can help you prioritize your work for the day. This enables you to spend your time on the most important task instead of wasting it away. And if something comes up, you can put them in separate lists and reschedule them for later.

Increases motivation

It’s easy to get frustrated when you have a big project. Crossing off an item in your to-do list can give you a sense of accomplishment and motivate you to keep going for work.

By doing so, you’re tapping into your body’s most powerful motivator — dopamine. Finishing even a small task on your to-do list is itself a reward. Checking off items releases a small amount of dopamine, which can motivate you to push through to the next task.

Reduces mental strain

Have you ever stopped a task halfway through, but found yourself ruminating about it throughout the day?

That’s the Zeigarnik Effect—the concept that we remember incomplete tasks better than completed tasks.

In other words, adding tasks that are unfinished lingers on your mind, which can reduce your focus in other areas.

Keeping a to-do list essentially allows you to do a “brain dump,” which helps keep stuff off your mind and on the page.

How to create a to-do list

There’s a lot more to creating a to-do list than simply writing down what you need to do for the day. While that can certainly work, you’ll be much more productive when you take a systematic approach.

Follow these steps to create an effective to-do list.

#1. Pick a medium

Using a pen and paper is an easy way to get started, but there are also a number of downsides to consider—you can’t easily organize your work, set notifications for recurring tasks, or assign tasks to your team members.

This isn’t to say that you should immediately toss out your notebooks. There will always be a place for paper lists. But when you need a clear overview of everything that’s going on, then opting for a software solution is the way to go.

Using a productivity app for your to do lists lets you quickly capture and prioritize your tasks, so they stay top of mind. They also include tons of other features that you just can’t do with a pen and paper.

Here’s an example of how teams use monday.com to manage their tasks and the built-in collaboration feature to communicate:

There’s no wrong answer here as it ultimately comes down to personal preference. Some people prefer a pen and paper, while others depend on their productivity app of choice for everything.

Choose a medium that works for you and stick with it.

#2. List out all the tasks you need to do

Staying on top of personal tasks and work items isn’t easy. Organize your tasks by creating a master list—a to-do list that contains everything you need to complete (e.g., pick up the dry-cleaning, work on that presentation, prepare the sales report, etc.)

Jot down all your tasks in your medium of choice. Each of the to-dos on your list should be specific and actionable.

For example, simply writing “Outline” doesn’t really tell you much. It’s too vague. Try to write something like “Draft a blog post outline on X topic” instead.

#3. Organize your tasks by priority

Look through your list and assign each a rating. If you’re using a notebook, write down a number next to each list item from 1 to 5 with 1 being high priority and 5 being low priority.

In monday.com, you can also add High, Medium, and Low labels to your to-do items to indicate their priority. These labels are also color-coded, so you can scan your board and quickly identify what you need to focus on now.

Here’s an example of how you can use color-coded labels to prioritize items in monday.com:

#4. Remove low-value tasks

Delegate or remove these tasks from your to-do list altogether. This will help you keep your most important tasks top of mind and avoid getting distracted.

And if you can’t bring yourself to delete something, you can create a board called “Someday” in monday.com and drop tasks in there that you can revisit at any time.

#5. Break down large tasks into smaller steps

Finishing what you need to do for the day seems like a tall order. You might even put off a task simply because you feel overwhelmed.

Break down seemingly large tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. For example, if one of your tasks is “create an editorial calendar,” you might break that down into smaller tasks like:

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when looking at your to-do list. But breaking down a large task into smaller subtasks like in the example above makes your work more manageable.

#6. Add deadlines

Work expands to fill the time available.

Parkinson’s law is something you might be familiar with. For example, if you know you have a few weeks to write a report, you’ll likely take your time on it.

But if your boss says the report is due by the end of the day, you’ll do everything in your power to get it done even if it means taking a shorter lunch (or skipping it altogether).

Here’s an example of how you can set deadlines and due date reminders in monday.com:

Setting deadlines not only keeps your projects on the right track, but also stops you from procrastinating. You can even have monday.com send you a push notification directly to your iOS or Android device.

At this point, you should have a to-do list with details on what you need to do. Unfortunately, those tasks aren’t going to do themselves.

Let’s look at how you can tackle your work.

How do you manage a to-do list?

It’s easy to get sidetracked and lose an entire afternoon browsing Facebook or watching videos on YouTube.

Here are some productivity methods to help you manage your list and get work done.

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a task management system for organizing your tasks. There are 5 basic steps:

This productivity method offers a simple way to get distracting thoughts out of your head and focus your attention to where it matters most.

Eat That Frog

Mark Twain said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Not an actual frog, of course. Eat That Frog is a metaphor for tackling your Most Important Task (MIT) first thing in the morning. It’s the equivalent of being the first to volunteer for a presentation to get it out of the way.

Ivy Lee method

Write down just 6 of the most important things you need to accomplish the next day. Then prioritize them in order of importance. Focus on the first task until it’s finished and then move on to the next one.

1-3-5 rule

Write down 1 big task, 3 medium tasks, and 5 small tasks. Start with the big tasks first and work your way through the others.

Kanban boards

A Kanban board helps you visualize your workflow and track a project across different stages. A board consists of columns and cards that you can move around.

With a Kanban board, you can quickly see where things stand at a glance and organize your entire workflow in one place.

Time blocking

Time blocking or time batching is a time management method where you block off a period of time in your calendar to focus solely on one task.

It’s the productivity method that Cal Newport, a Computer Science professor at Georgetown University, relies on for “deep work” or working without distractions.

Here’s what it looks like from Cal (though I have to admit I have no idea what’s going on in this picture):

Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is straightforward—set a 25-minute timer and focus on a task from your to-do list. Then take a 5-minute break and start the 25-minute timer again. Rinse and repeat until you’ve crossed off a task from your list.

There’s no single best way to manage your to-do list. Experiment with different systems and choose one that works for you.

How monday.com helps you manage your to-do list

But if you want to quickly capture tasks, set reminders, and collaborate on action items from one place, then you need a more robust solution.

monday.com is a versatile platform that helps you stay on top of your to do’s. The interface is highly customizable, so you can adapt it to fit your existing workflow.

Get started with your to-do list

At some point, we’ve all ended up with an endless number of things to do. It’s easy to forget key details unless you have a system in place to capture and organize those tasks.

Use monday.com’s Daily Task Tracker template to help you create and manage your to-do list from one place. The temple is fully customizable—add new columns, customize your labels, and even integrate with your favorite apps.

Try our platform now, the first two weeks are on us!

How to manage a to-do list

It’s easy to make a to-do list, but not so easy to follow through with it. Is the problem with our list or with us or with both? We all need to know how to manage a to-do list, because we all have things we need to get done.

There are three basic steps you need to take to manage your to-do list:

When we follow these three simple steps, we’ll find that our to-do lists work effectively, keeping us on track to get done our most important work.

PS – at the end of this article, you’ll find a free resource I’ve put together to teach you the habits of effectively managing your to-do list every day.

My YouTube channel has several quick videos with to-do list management tips:

Make your to-do list reasonable and prioritized

When we have lists and lists of undifferentiated, random, mixed up tasks floating around, it takes too much time and mental energy to sort through the clutter and figure out what’s next.

Our to do lists should be set up in such a way that it makes it fast and easy to know what’s next.

First, to keep track of the various projects, responsibilities, and needs in our lives effectively, we need to have multiple to-do lists. Don’t freak out. Each one has a specific job and a different use.

Second, all your lists need to be reasonable and clear. Are the tasks on that list actually doable? Are they overambitious? If you can break a to-do item down into sub tasks that can be done in under 30 minutes, then you should. What you actually have in that case is not a task, but a project. A project is an outcome you want to achieve that will take multiple steps. Each step is a task, so break it down.

Making your list longer with more to-do items might seem like it will be overwhelming, but what’s actually overwhelming and paralyzing is a list of things that can’t be done or that are ambiguous and vague.

Replace vague phrasing with clarity to help yourself get started with the task. Start each item on your list with a verb, with the action that you need to take.

When our tasks are both written down and phrased well (by starting with the action we need to take), we can use our minds and attention for creative thinking, problem solving, and focused action. To manage a to do list, we need to keep it clear and clarified.

Make a to-do list each day with your top 3 priorities

What we plan to do even a month out can quickly be negated because our lives are not our own orchestration. We’re living lives of service to others, and that means we need to be nimble and adaptable and cheerful in the midst of unexpected change.

If, each day, we choose only 3 Most Important Things (MIT), we get 3 benefits that long to do lists or elaborate planning systems can’t offer:

So, what sorts of things make it on to this top 3 list?

Aren’t there so many more things than 3 to do each day? Yes. There are.

That’s why I get questions like this, often:

Mystie, I really struggle with 3 MITs. Read my Bible, homeschool, and tidy up are always the recurring three. Embarrassing but true, after 9 years of homeschooling, each still has to be written down daily so I make sure it gets done each day. Should I bump up to 6 MIT, to make room for 3 important tasks, or just have 2 separate MIT lists?

One mistake that’s easy to make is to list a project goal instead of a task. A task should take around 15 minutes or less to complete. If it would take longer, it likely could be – and should be – broken up into more manageable chunks.

Yes, that means less progress overall, but it also means you might actually check items off your list instead of avoiding them altogether because each one is too daunting.

If you’re in a survival season, your MITs will be the basics that should be in a routine. If you don’t have a routine plan, you need to create one and practice it as a project first – not add further extras to your plate. There will be other seasons in life, but it’s healthy to recognize when you’re in a season that doesn’t allow you much extra bandwidth.

Whatever your season or your responsibilities, however, the most important mistake to avoid is that of biting off more than you can chew. Make those top 3 tasks actually doable in a day. The point of limiting ourselves to 3 is so that we have a chance of actually crossing things off our list and even completing the list. Don’t defeat that purpose by adding something like

That might be a list of three, but each item is huge!

A good rule of thumb is to keep each line item at a 15 minute time estimate.

There are 3 ways you could keep your Daily Top 3 to do list:

If you use a method that allows you to choose more than 3 tasks, however, you must be careful that those tasks are very bite-sized. Ideally, being able to cross each item off your list should take you no more than 15 minutes.

Sidebar: Survival Mode To-Do List Management

If you’re in survival mode right now, try keeping a daily index card, but without any top MITs. In fact, use half the card or the back half to copy out a mindset-orienting quote or encouraging Bible verse to help you keep your heart centered in the midst of the crazy chaos. Then, write what you did do on your card as you go through the day instead of starting off with a card of what you hope you might do. Give yourself the credit for meeting emergency needs, snuggling babies and toddlers, and feeding and clothing everyone.

Those are three Most Important Things. Count them.

Look at your to-do list every day.

Once we have our lists and they’re orderly, clear, and action-focused, we have to actually look at them – every single day.

Usually, our biggest struggle in managing a to-do list is not the design or the order or the format, but in the looking and using of the lists we have already.

We need to build the habit of looking at our list every day:

When we make it routine to look at our list, then it becomes possible and even likely that our next actions will be taken as a direct result of how that list informs our choices.

Revise your to-do list every week.

Life changes. It just does. That means that our lists need to change, too, in response to reality and our actual responsibilities rather than our wishful thinking. We don’t want to waste time with escapist planning, we want to have useful to do lists that actually reflect what we ought to be doing.

A weekly review is a keystone planning practice that we all need to implement if our plans are going to reflect reality and be useful in our day-to-day lives.

During a weekly review, we adjust the to do lists, add to them, delete wishful thinking from them, and choose what’s up next.

Our days should be primarily action-based, working from the lists. But weekly we need to step back and think big picture about what does belong on the list, and make sure they are up to date.

When we have times of work and times of reflective updating and planning, we can keep calm clarity amidst changing needs and circumstances.

Personal To-Do List: The Unique Ways to Manage Manually

There is a common flaws in us more or less. We tend to miss our deadlines. Do you always miss your deadlines similarly? Maybe you feel troubled to remember your regular must-have works. Actually, creating a personal to-do list is not a tough job, the real task is here to follow it perfectly.

You may think that it’s as simple as making it properly. No, you’re living in a fools garden. Just try to maintain it. You’ll understand how tough it is. Anyway, if you daily create your task list, it can reduce your stress and improve your work success ratio.

We think the most effective way is to organize the daily tasks that you need to complete manually. Managing the entire to-do list is the main challenge. Let’s see how you can manage your to-do list efficiently.

Table of Contents

The Useful Techniques of Managing To-Do List

We are living in a world full of resources nowadays as web world is offering us many options. But selecting the best is the main task, right? Many techniques are available on the web to build a to-do list; most of them don’t work well. However, we are sure that the below methods will help you in real life. Most amazingly, this will also assist you in completing your regular work.

9 efficient techniques of managing to-do lists are:

Now let’s dive deep into the points.

Write the Working Date on the Top of Your List

Writing is the omni-channel that lives in everywhere. However, when you’re maintaining a to-do list, you have to write. The writing techniques can be different from each other. So before starting any work, it is essential to write down the date (example- 11 Apr 2020), and day (Saturday) in your note pad.

This habit will help you to remember when the work was performed. When you summarize your previous work, you will not have to do brainstorming.

Practice Using the Sticky Pad

The sticky pad is colorful and easy to bear so that when you need to note down something significant, you can write it quickly. Besides that, you can stick it wherever you want, like on your desk, wall, fridge or your notebook. Therefore, the bright colored sticky pads are more helpful in remembering daily tasks.

Make a Task List for a Day

Do not write a to-do list for more than one day. Note down the vivid amount of tasks and a minimum amount of responsibilities (five or six). Include every task that you must have to do today. It can be your doctor’s appointment, an important meeting, buying a gift for your beloved, etc.

Use Colored Pens

Who doesn’t like to use a color pen? Well, you can apply the color pen to decorate your to-do list. It not only helps you with just coloring but also can remark your tasks instantly.

Write Down the Time of Your Meetings and Appointments

In our office or working life, we have to attend multiple meetings. Sometimes we need to visit a doctor, lawyer, or meet with an important person. But remembering everything is not possible each time, we may forget any crucial meeting.

So that if you note down the essential schedule for each day, you will never miss an appointment. Another important thing, try to use a colorful highlighter to mark your programs.

Track Your Working Hour

Sometimes we don’t remember the time while working. And, we feel it when we miss one task for another one. It happens for poor time maintenance. So what are the proper solutions? Well, one of the best ways is to track your working hours. Then you can realize how much time you have spent on completing a task. For tracking work hours, you can save your precious time.

Prepare Your To-Do List the Night Before Your Working Day

According to different kinds of research, it’s proven that organizing your worklist at night before the working day can improve your success ratio.

To add the tasks in your personal to-do list, you need to memorize the whole day you will pass tomorrow. Check your emails, messages, or Slack to know what is essential work for the next day. It will not only save your time but also helps you to reduce the pressure in your brain.

Make a Tick Box

Create tick boxes on the left of each task. Ticking on the boxes will help you to remember which works are done. Try to do this with color pens.

Reward Yourself If the Listed Work is Done

So have you completed all of your works today? If yes, then please reward yourself with your favourite food or something you like most. It will allow you to achieve your daily responsibilities even more.

Benefits of Making Personal To-Do List

If you can build a good habit to create a to-do list, you will get lots of advantage. These will not only help you to be systematic but also support you mentally.

Summing Up on Personal To-Do List

What do you think? It’s very tough to manage? In fact, you may find it uneasy because you could have little quantity of dedication. Dedication is the key in everywhere. Managing a to-do list is not a hard job though we refuse to spend some minutes.

This is one of the best habits which can make you fruitful and organized. Just spend your 20-25 minutes every day creating a list of your daily work and see the result after one month.

So, those are the techniques to manage a personal to-do list. Do you have any unique method of managing daily life? If yes, then share it with us in the comment section below. We are eager to listen to it from you.

The To-Do list: How to use to-do lists in the most productive way

A to-do list is nothing but a list of tasks you need to complete in a certain period of time.

It’s a very simple, efficient and extremely popular productivity tool, the only problem is that you can find a lot of conflicting advice online on whether to-do lists work or not, and whether you should keep them in your productivity tool belt at all.

In this blog post, we’ll explore whether to-do lists are an efficient productivity tool, which types of to-do lists to use, how to organize them, and how to make sure the to-do list really works in your favor.

The main benefits of to-do lists

Let’s start with the 10 main benefits of keeping neatly organized to-do lists:

Lists, especially visualized ones, bring a lot of value to your personal organization system. Looking at all the benefits, it’s a no brainer.

It definitely makes sense to organize your business and personal life with to-do lists, but there are several traps you should avoid, as we will explore in the next section.

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Why don’t to-do lists work for some people?

Some people claim that to-do lists just don’t work for them, and most often this is because they make some common mistakes when trying to implement them.

So, let’s look at the biggest errors one can make when using lists and how to avoid them.

1. Not taking the time to plan and regularly update your lists

To-do lists must be regularly groomed, otherwise they become obsolete. Make sure you timebox your planning time in your personal calendar.

2. Having too many items on the list

The more choices you have, the harder it is to decide where and how to start. That’s why it’s really important to limit how many tasks you put on your to-do lists. Don’t only have a never ending list of tasks.

It makes sense to put 3 – 5 bigger tasks on your to-do list per day and perhaps a few smaller ones also. That comes to approximately 15 – 25 tasks per week.

Divide tasks into «to-do», «selected», «in progress» and «done» column. Make sure there’s a manageable number of tasks selected to be done and the ones in progress.

3. Starting with easy tasks

It makes sense to prioritize tasks on your to-do list from the most important to the least important one.

Then you should follow the eat that frog philosophy and start with the most difficult task on your list, otherwise, the most important tasks may never get done.

4. Micromanaging yourself

The idea of to-do lists isn’t to micromanage yourself. If you have to refill your stapler, don’t put it on your list.

Think less about smaller tasks and more about experiences, improvements, outputs, and stories that you can break down into tasks which can be performed in a 2-hour working flow.

5. Make sure your to-do list is not boring

If you see a long list of things you should do, and you don’t get excited by all the value you will create and provide (for yourself, your employer, or your customer) it’s hard to be motivated.

Thus you must make sure you do things that are aligned with your life vision and mission, things you are good at, and tasks that motivate you to grow and develop yourself.

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The best way to keep a to-do list

There are several ways of keeping your lists in check. You can use a pen and paper. You can use desktop software or a digital notepad.

Many online applications are available, like Todoist, Microsoft To Do, Google Task, Remember The Milk or Monday and others. You have to test, try and experiment to find what works best for you.

When choosing the best to-do list software, one thing is really important to remember: make sure the solution enables you to visualize your to-do list on a Kanban board.

Trello is perhaps the most popular tool in this regard. A visual board is a much better option than just a long list, and it’s also much more fun to use.

When you’re in doubt about which tool to use for any list, follow the rule of visualizing as much as possible.

Different to-do lists you can use for maximum productivity

There are several different to-do lists (and a few sub-lists) you should keep in order to stay completely organized on a daily basis, while also keeping a macro perspective on what you want to achieve in your business or personal life, and where you want to go.

Here are some potential to-do lists you can use to organize yourself:

Other lists – All other lists that help you organize yourself and keep as many things as possible on paper, in order to free up your brain power for more important things.

Some examples of those kind of lists are personal improvement lists, grocery shopping lists, anti-shopping lists, reading lists, and so on.

Now let’s look closer at the purpose of each of the above-mentioned lists.

Easy to clock-in and out. Timesheets always up-to-date. Manage and approve absences.

1. Vision list or your bucket list – the basis for long-term planning

You should see the world as a playground with unlimited opportunities for growing, enjoying and creating, individually and in collaboration with other people. Also, you should put everything you intend to experience in life on your vision list (or board).

Your vision backlog should always empower you and give you motivation when you’re feeling down. Your life vision is like a compass that helps you follow your true North.

You should keep 50 – 70 items on your vision list and make sure you regularly groom (update) the list, at least twice per year.

2. Maybe someday list

If you’re a curious human being and want to experience many things in your life, your vision list can quickly become too long, and you can start feeling overwhelmed by the notion that there won’t be enough time for everything you want to do.

The “maybe someday” list should prevent your vision list from becoming overwhelming.

There are definitely some things that you aren’t 100% sure you want to do, or if you didn’t do them, you wouldn’t regret it on your deathbed. These things should go on your “maybe someday” list.

3. The quarterly to-do list: a link between long-term and short-term planning

In business and politics, there is the so-called period of the “first 100 days”, where the new leader (the US president, for example) has a chance to prove himself.

In these 100 days, a leader should set a new, better course for the organization, bring new positive momentum to the environment, identify and mitigate the biggest risks, build the dream team, and so on.

With that in mind, your mindset should be that you get a new 100 days after every 100 days that passes. Every 100 days, you have an opportunity to implement an upgraded and updated tactical plan.

Every 100 days is a time for new and improved tactics, prioritizing, reflection, taking the upcoming time period deadly seriously, and treating every 100 days as though they were your first.

With a quarterly to-do list, you should decide on the tactical level which areas of life you should focus on for the next 3 months by considering your life vision, your current situation, new opportunities and changes in the environment, your new desires and feelings, feedback from your teammates and other people, and so on.

4. Weekly to-do list

Based on your quarterly to-do list and other tasks that come your way, you should prepare a weekly to-do list. The general recommendations are to plan your weekly to-do list on a Sunday evening or Monday morning.

It’s important to plan the week in advance. As mentioned, the best practice is to use a Kanban board to visualize your weekly workflow.

It’s also important to limit Work in Progress (WIP). With the right amount of work in progress, you can be in the flow instead of facing anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, or boredom.

In practical terms, limiting work in progress means not putting too many post-it notes on your board.

To-Do Lists

The Key to Efficiency

Do you often feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you have to do? Do you find yourself missing deadlines? Or do you sometimes just forget to do something important, so that people have to chase you to get work done?

All of these are symptoms of not keeping a proper «To-Do List.» These are prioritized lists of all the tasks that you need to carry out. They list everything that you have to do, with the most important tasks at the top of the list, and the least important tasks at the bottom.

By keeping such a list, you make sure that your tasks are written down all in one place so you don’t forget anything important. And by prioritizing tasks, you plan the order in which you’ll do them, so that you can tell what needs your immediate attention, and what you can leave until later.

To-do lists are essential if you’re going to beat work overload. When you don’t use them effectively, you’ll appear unfocused and unreliable to the people around you.

When you do use them effectively, you’ll be much better organized, and you’ll be much more reliable. You’ll experience less stress, safe in the knowledge that you haven’t forgotten anything important. More than this, if you prioritize intelligently, you’ll focus your time and energy on high-value activities, which will mean that you’re more productive, and more valuable to your team.

Keeping a properly structured and thought-out list sounds simple enough. But it can be surprising how many people fail to use them at all, never mind use them effectively.

In fact, it’s often when people start to use them effectively and sensibly that they make their first personal productivity breakthroughs, and start making a success of their careers. The video, below, gives some tips on how you can start to use to-do lists more effectively.

Click here to view a transcript of this video.

Preparing a To-Do List

Start by downloading our free template. Then follow these steps:

Step 1:

Write down all of the tasks that you need to complete. If they’re large tasks, break out the first action step, and write this down with the larger task. (Ideally, tasks or action steps should take no longer than 1-2 hours to complete.)

You may find it easier to compile several lists (covering personal, study, and workplace, for example). Try different approaches and use the best for your own situation.

Step 2:

Run through these tasks allocating priorities from A (very important, or very urgent) to F (unimportant, or not at all urgent).

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If too many tasks have a high priority, run through the list again and demote the less important ones. Once you have done this, rewrite the list in priority order.

Using Your To-Do List

To use your list, simply work your way through it in order, dealing with the A priority tasks first, then the Bs, then the Cs, and so on. As you complete tasks, tick them off or strike them through.

What you put on your list and how you use it will depend on your situation. For instance, if you’re in a sales-type role, a good way to motivate yourself is to keep your list relatively short, and aim to complete it every day.

But if you’re in an operational role, or if tasks are large or dependent on too many other people, then it may be better to focus on a longer-term list, and «chip away» at it day-by-day.

Many people find it helpful to spend, say, 10 minutes at the end of the day, organizing tasks on their list for the next day.

Using Software

Although using a paper list is an easy way to get started, software-based approaches can be more efficient in spite of the learning curve. These can remind you of events or tasks that will soon be overdue, they can also be synchronized with your phone or email, and they can be shared with others on your team, if you’re collaborating on a project.

There are many time management software programs available. At a simple level, you can use MSWord or MSExcel to manage your lists. Some versions of Microsoft Outlook, and other email services such as Gmail™, have task lists as standard features. Remember the Milk is another popular online task management tool that will sync with your smartphone, PDA, or email account. It can even show you where your tasks are on a map. Other similar services include Todoist and Toodledo.

One of the biggest advantages to using a software-based approach to manage your list is that you can update it easily. For example, instead of scratching off tasks and rewriting the list every day, software allows you to move and prioritize tasks quickly.

All of us think, plan and work differently. A program that works well for a colleague might not work well for you simply because you learn and think in your own way. This is why it’s useful to research and try several different ways of compiling your list before deciding on a single system.

Examples

To-do lists can help you get, and stay, on top of important projects and piles of tasks or decisions.

For instance, imagine you’re heading a team that’s working on a project. There are so many tasks to do, and so many people doing them, that staying on top of it all seems overwhelming.

In this situation, structure your list by team member, writing out tasks and deadlines for every person on the project. Each day as you write out your own tasks that need completion, you can also check your Team To-Do List to see who’s working on what, and if anything is due in that day. You can also include other tasks that you need to complete as part of your job.

Or, imagine you’re in a sales role and have a long list of people who you need to talk to. You write out a list of everyone you need to call and every client you need to see, and start prioritizing.

You know that one client is really keen on your product and is ready to buy, so you prioritize them with an «A» – this is a prospect that’s really worth focusing on. Conversely, you know that another prospect is playing you off against several competitors, meaning that you’ll make less profit, and that there’s a reasonable chance that you won’t get the business. You prioritize this person with a «D». It’s worth making some effort here, but you should focus most of your attention on better prospects.

Key Points

To be well organized in the workplace, you need to be using to-do lists. By using them, you will ensure that:

Start by listing all of the tasks that you must carry out.

Mark the importance of the task next to it, with a priority from A (very important) to F (unimportant). Redraft the list into this order of importance. Then carry out the jobs at the top of the list first. These are the most important, most beneficial tasks to complete.

You can also use software-based approaches to manage your list. You can often access these from anywhere, and they can often be synced with your Smartphone or PDA.

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