A lot of productivity experts say you should keep your daily to-do list short. In fact, you should keep your list to five items or less.
“After all,” they say, “there’s nothing as de-motivating as an unfinished to-do list. And the best way to make sure you do everything on your list is to have a short list.”
Sounds like pretty good advice. So, every day, you try not to put more than five tasks on your to-do list.
But, somehow, you still don’t manage to get everything done. And, as you get ready for bed at night, every unchecked box on your to-do list seems to mock you.
So, what’s the problem?
Your daily to-do list is probably too long. Not in terms of how many tasks are on it, but how long it will take you to do those tasks.
Say your daily to-do list only has four items on it. That sounds doable, right?
But it will take you five hours to complete those tasks. And, with everything else you’ve got going on that day, you’ll only have three hours to actually do the stuff on your to-do list.
So you’ve given yourself five hours of work, but only have three hours to do it in?
You see the problem.
You need to tweak your daily to-do lists so you don’t give yourself more stuff to do than time will allow.
Here’s how you do it.
- Make up your list of three to five tasks.
- Estimate how long it will take you to complete each task.
- Add those estimates together to get the total estimate. This is the amount of time you think it will actually take to complete your to-do list.
- Now think about your day, and all of the stuff you have to do. Then ask yourself, “Will I really have time to do everything on this list?”
If the answer is “yes,” you’re good to go.
If the answer is “no,” you have two options. You can take a task or two off of your to-do list. Or you can chunk the tasks on your list down into smaller tasks that won’t take as long to complete.
For example, what if one of the tasks on your list was, “Write my essay.” That task (which is really a project, but that’s a topic for another post) could take you several hours. Unless that essay is due tomorrow, put a smaller, essay-related task on your list, like:
- Brainstorm possible essay topics.
- Put together an outline.
- Work on my essay for thirty minutes.
Most of us tend to underestimate when trying to figure out how long things will take. So give yourself a little wiggle room. Once you’ve totaled up your estimates, add an hour, maybe even two, to account for any task that ends up taking longer than you thought it would.
Once you get the hang of estimating how long tasks will actually take, you’ll start creating daily to-do lists that you can actually complete. And knowing it’s possible to do everything on your to-do list will motivate you to do everything on your to-do list.
Do you usually get everything on your daily to-do list done? Or do your to-do lists still have empty check-boxes at the end of the day?
