In my last post, ‘What DoYou Have ‘TO-DO’...Today? ‘, I talked about the significance of a Daily To-Do List to get all things done during the day.

But making a To-Do List alone is not a panacea for time management. There are efficient and not-so-efficient ‘To-Do’ lists.

So, how do we come up with an efficient ‘To-Do’ list?

Since the effort put in through a Daily To-Do list is a building block of the overall effort towards our long-term goals, we must break our bigger efforts into smaller chunks so that they could be addressed bit by bit in each Daily ‘To-Do’ list. For example, if you plan to finish a do-it-yourself project in 6 months, then there must be a quota of effort dedicated to your To-Do list on a daily basis. In other words, you will tend to execute your project bit-by-bit daily for the next 6 months or until it is successfully completed.

To accommodate smaller chunks of bigger efforts in your Daily ‘To-Do’ lists, you will need to calculate the size of the chunk in terms of time. Let us say, you came up with 1 hour worth of effort on a daily basis towards this DIY project. This one hour effort should then become a permanent fixture of your Daily ‘To-Do’ list until the project is successfully completed.

When you get down to populating the list a night before, you should include all types of activities, big or small. When collated fully, the list will attain the shape of an inefficient to-do list. The varying efficiency of the to-do lists results in the difference between a not-so-successful person and a successful one.

The efficiency of a to-do list has less to do with how pretty or systematic the list looks. It has more to do with getting your important things done imperatively. The not-so-important activities could be relegated to a later date.  With little practice and rigor, you may be able to address the low priority items/activities also along with the high priority ones.

Your list of daily activities is very personal to you. You will tend to learn from your own experience and you will likely go through the following stages before your list becomes as efficient as it could be: -

·         [STAGE 1] No Daily ‘To-Do’ List – You will not get much done during the day

·         [STAGE 2] A Daily ‘To-Do’ List  - You will have captured what to do but you may run short of time due to disruptions

·         [STAGE 3] An efficient Daily To-Do List – You will complete the high priority activities but may have to sacrifice the low-priority ones in case of disruptions

·         [STAGE 4] An optimal Daily To-Do List – You will complete the high-priority activities along with the low-priority ones by deriving synergy out of combination of activities

If you start at the very beginning, regular practice and rigor will help you graduate to the next stage(s) over time.

In my next post, I will talk about a systematic technique to reach Stage 4 of Daily To-Do Lists from a scratch as fast as possible.