Do you keep an ever growing to-do list of things you need, or want, to get done?
Peter Bregman over at Harvard Business Review offers some helpful tips on how to manage your to-do list and boost your personal productivity.
How to Manage Your To-Do List
1. Schedule for today. Decide which ones you can get done today, and schedule a time to do them.
2. No more than three days. Each day, review your list and decide what things, if any, you want to schedule on your calendar for that day. But don’t let anything hang around on your list for more than three days.
3. Do it immediately. For anything that has been on your to-do list for more than three days, see if there’s any you can do right now. If so, do them now and scratch them off your list.
4. Schedule for a future date. For anything that’s left, decide if you can schedule to do them on a future date.
5. Let it go. Is there anything that you wanted to do, but didn’t want to schedule, that you should just let go and forget about it? If so, let it go.
6. Add to the someday/maybe list. Create a list of things you want to do someday or maybe. And add any to-dos that you think are important to do sometime, but aren’t important enough to take action now or to schedule for any particular time. You can refer to that list from time to time, and not let these undone items clutter up your to-do list or give you guilt that you haven’t gotten them done yet.
For some time now, I’ve scheduled many of my to-do list items on my calendar. I’ve found it to be a helpful way to get things done. But I still have multiple to-do lists of things I keep adding.
I really like his idea of the someday/maybe list, so I can get these items off my to-do list, and yet still keep them written down to do sometime when I finally get motivated to to them.
How do you manage your to-do list?
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