How to do your to-do list
The Insight
Life seems to have a habit of getting busier and busier, putting increasing demands on our most valuable resource – time. People are told they can have successful careers while maintaining a fulfilling family life, bonding with their friendship group, getting the right amount of exercise, eating right, taking care of their mental health, expanding their horizons, learning new skills, living consciously… the list goes on. It’s exhausting and virtually impossible to achieve.
My work to-do list is always longer than my working day (or week) could ever be. For me, the first step to managing my time is accepting one fact:
Not everything will get done.
This isn’t from a ‘well why bother, I’m never going to get it done anyway’ mindset. More that I need to be okay with not getting everything done for the sake of my mental health and my relationships both inside and outside of work.
There are plenty of tips out there around avoiding procrastination, delegating where possible and blocking out time for certain activities. For me, the most important thing is to identify what I should get done by understanding that there is a difference between importance and urgency.
The Impact
Differentiating between important and urgent is a time management philosophy first identified by the 34th US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Understanding where you should be spending your time is fundamental to delivering what is critical and managing some of the mental load. Every task can be categorised by the below:
Tasks that are not important and not urgent should not take up any part of your time. Push them to the bottom of the list and forget about them.
Tasks that are important and urgent should get your attention first. For me, that is addressing items such as responses to urgent construction queries that have the potential to cause delays.
These are no-brainers. The next two can be harder to sort.
The first is tasks that are important but not urgent. For me, this can be things such as making sure I’m logging my CPD hours and undertaking business planning sessions. While not urgent, they are important and will have consequences if not addressed. If ignored, sometimes they will transition to important and urgent (such as CPD logging). Other times they will stay in this category but will result in you failing to progress in terms of the bigger picture (such as for business planning).
The second, and often most difficult, is the tasks that are urgent but not important. This is where a lot of the ‘noise’ comes from. It can be meetings for the sake of meetings. It can be the client who is screaming at you down the phone to get something done because they have messed something up on their end (not my clients, of course). While it may be extremely urgent, and also likely very important to them, this does not necessarily mean it should be important to you. These tasks should never take precedence over those that are important and urgent.
Despite best intentions, it is not possible to keep all of the people happy all of the time. Clarity about where your priorities lie allows you to deliver the critical items, manage the distraction of unimportant ‘noise’, and proactively deal with any shortfall in your capacity.