One of the best things about using a to-do list is that it gets off your mind all the little things swirling around in your head that are preventing you from developing creative solutions to the many issues you face.

You spend all day burning mental energy worrying about everything you think you have to do instead of having the mental space to come up with solutions. Getting all those things out and into an external place generates that space.

The flip side of that, though, is that once you do have everything swirling around in your mind out into a list, our natural reaction is to feel we must get all those tasks done ASAP.

The thing is, that is likely, not true. Many of the items on our list can wait. If you want to become better at managing your time and be a lot less anxious and stressed, you need to break down that list to spread out the tasks you feel compelled to do.

Master the art of prioritisation.

Let’s start with the premise; you cannot do everything in one day. So, the natural question is, what can I do in one day?

This answer should be realistic and leave you feeling challenged but not exhausted. It’s not about what you would like to do in one day; it’s about what you can do each day.

To get to this stage, you need to know your essentials. For instance, if you were in sales, how many customers do you have to be in contact with each day at a very minimum? Likewise, if you are a teacher, how many classes do you have to teach and prepare for, as a minimum, each day?

Likewise, in your personal life: what are the daily essentials for your relationships, hobbies (remember those?) and personal development?

These tasks are what I like to call your “Core Work”. It is the minimum you need to do each day.

Once you know what these are, you will know what time you have left for everything else. If you find you don’t have any time left in the day after you have completed these, you should go back and get very strict about what you call “essential”.

Today, for instance, my “essentials” are:

• writing the first draft of this blog post (2 hours)

• Writing the first draft of my Learning Note essay (1 hour)

• responding to my communications (1 hour)

• taking my dog out for a walk (90 mins)

• writing the feedback for my coaching clients (90 mins)

In total, my essentials will take 7 hours.

If I take out the one personal essential today, that leaves me with 5 ½ hours of focused work for today. That’s certainly doable. Taking my dog out for his walk will be a nice break in the day.

If you build your daily to-do list around your essentials and ensure that they get done, you will feel far more fulfilled at the end of the day.

There are other things I would like to do today, but if I postpone those until another day, that would be fine. I started the day knowing that as long as I get these five things done, I will be on top of my work, have done my high-value tasks, and rest at the end of the day feeling satisfied and relaxed.

Once you know what your essentials are, you have built the foundations of a productive day. If you continue to randomly add tasks to your task manager in the false belief that everything on there is important, you will not only fail, you will fail AND be stressed out and overwhelmed.

We cannot do everything all at once. It’s impossible. You could continue to fight it, but you will lose, and it will be a defeat that comes with a terrible cost to your health and future success in both your professional and personal life. That cost is too high.

If you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, begin with your essentials. Then, fine-tune these until they are the absolute essentials, and make sure you have time allocated for them. Once that’s done, you will know how much time you have left for the nonessentials, and you can, if you wish, work on those.

The great thing about knowing what your essentials are each day is that you still have time to deal with the unexpected — those urgent demands from your boss or handling a dissatisfied customer. There’s always time for those if your focus is on the essentials and you have done what you can to eliminate the nonessential. Your problems will begin when you start to prioritise the nonessential. It’s then that things will quickly spiral out of control, and no to-do list will help you then.

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊

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