When you have fewer commitments, your tendency towards To-Do list is lower
For a long while (even in the early days of AlphaEfficiency) I wasn’t endorsing To-Do lists. At the beginning of my productivity journey, I’ve viewed them not only as an interruption, but as an activity with maintenance cost, one which was severely slowing me down. At that time, this was a fact of life, as I truly had only a few key assignments during the day that had to be executed. My brain was replacing the To-Do list just fine. I know it is blasphemous to say that memory can work as a To-Do list in GTD® and Productivity circles, but when you need to do 2–3 things in a single day, it really does work just fine.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of people will never truly understand the usefulness for task management as an activity. By the time necessity for it arises, these people will disregard it as something that doesn’t work, because they’ve already tried it before, where overhead didn’t justify the time investment.
Times and needs change
But lately I’ve been busy working, running AlphaEfficiency magazine, helping friends get their startups up, and as the natural consequence, there was an endless task list that seemed like a unstoppable treadmill. This transformed my life into an endless chase from one task to the next. The fact that I had a to-do list, didn’t mean that I was completing every single task that was found on it. But it did mean that I was succeeding in an effort not to forget the important things to finish.
Later down the road, I’ve accumulated a couple of task management that weren’t operating as a full blown integrated system. And finally, these days I’ve been very grateful that I’ve been playing with them for so long, because the apps that I’ve observed as merely a toy, are now helping me push the things through the door.
When your commitments don’t scale, your to-do list is a safety net
You will never achieve a to-do list perfection, as it is always work in progress. The to-do list is simply a reflection of your life, and what is going on with it. It can be a pretty damn good indicator that we take too much on our plate. When your To-Do list is overfilled with tasks that you can’t possibly finish within a reasonable timeframe, you can use it to make hard decisions what needs to be fired from your life.
But in order to achieve any of these things, you need to follow up with one very important aspect of task management: Task Management is a complex habit.
Unlike other habits, where you repeat one action, over and over again, and you establish a habit, task management requires a multiple set of habits that are working together, in order to establish an integrated system that ensures premium productivity levels.
3 Habits That Build Task Management
Three essential habits that build task management workflow are rather simple:
- Collecting
- Organizing
- Executing
Everything else is going beyond the mechanics of the productivity principles and the CORE. While reviewing is nice to have, it isn’t necessary as beforementioned activities. If you keep collecting, organizing and executing, you will be operational.
These three habits will keep you in the game and will keep moving you forward. They are your three main elements that will move you towards your goals. Keep the emphasis on executing, and you will consistently push the boundaries of what is possible.
