How To Manage A Never Ending Todo List

Hello and welcome to episode 161 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week’s question is all about managing time. Now I know some people will claim you cannot manage time, and if we are talking about the amount of time we have each day that is true. But we can manage how we use that time and that is where many people struggle yet when you understand what you have and you know your limitations then it can be very easy to manage.

Now, before we get to this week’s question I just want to give you a heads up on my 2020 Thanksgiving holiday sale. This year I have kept things as simple as I can. All my courses and bundles of courses are currently available with a 30% discount. And for my coaching programmes, you can get yourself a 20% discount.

I’ve had to limit my coaching programme offer to the first twenty people as I do all the calls personally and I want to do the best job I can in helping people.

So if you are interested in joining my coaching programme please act soon as the available places are going fast.

Okay, on with this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Juan. Juan asks, hi Carl, I started to use your Time Sector System earlier this year and it has really helped me to simplify my workload. The problem I have though is I rarely complete my tasks for the day. I feel I have too many tasks and I don’t know how I can stay on top of all my work. How do you manage your tasks? Is there a way to always finish your work each day?

Hi Juan, thank you for your question.

Let’s look at this as an equation. There is two sides to this equation. The first side is time available. That’s fixed at 24 hours each daily cycle. You cannot change that. It’s the same for all of us. The second side is the work required to be done. That’s variable.

So, when you base your thinking on the fact that of the two sides to the time management equation only one is variable we can focus our attention on managing that side.

But first, on the work to be done side of the equation we have to factor in some fixed pieces. The first is sleep. We have to sleep. Now depending on your own personal sleep requirements that could be anything between six and nine hours per day. We also need to eat and that likely will take up a further ninety minutes.

So, of those twenty-four hours, we are already down to say fourteen hours per day (taking an average of ten hours for sleeping, eating and taking care of personal hygiene)

Now, having taken out time for the essentials—sleeping and eating etc—individually we may have other important tasks to take care of. For example, I schedule exercise time every day. I cannot function properly without exercise so I have an hour a day set aside for exercise.

You may have a young family and they will require time attention each day and that could be two to three hours.

Then we have our regular routines, household chores, paying bills, taking the garbage out and walking the dog. All these can quickly add up to an hour each day.

So, when you take into account your fixed time requirements, you are likely to have no more than eight to ten hours left to do all your other work.

But, it does not really end there. Another factor in this equation is your energy levels. We often assume we will have bundles of energy every day, but you know this is rarely the case. You may have not slept well the night before, you may be feeling a little sick or have a headache. All of these can have a debilitating effect on your energy levels which will affect the amount of work you can comfortably do each day.

The reason I explained that is most people’s expectations of what they can do each day is unrealistic. They bite off more than they can chew—as my mother used to say.

You need to get realistic on this side of the equation. It’s the only part of the equation you can manage.

If you use the Time Sector System, the key folder you are focused on each week is your This Week folder and you quickly learn how many tasks you can realistically accomplish each week because at the end of the week if you have any remaining tasks it will be an indicator of one of two things. Either you were being overoptimistic when you did your weekly planning or an emergency arose that took up a lot of time.

The longer you operate the Time Sector System you learn what your realistic task number is. For me, I have 17 recurring areas of focus each week. These are my most important, must-do tasks each week. They relate to my most important work such as preparing and recording this podcast, writing my blog post and recording my YouTube videos. They also include the tasks I need to complete in order to achieve my goals.

That leaves me with around twelve other tasks I can complete without putting myself under strain.

You might think twelve tasks in one week is not many, but when I talk about a task it could be planning an update to a course which will require around three to four hours, or preparing a workshop for a client company. These are not tasks like replying to an email. Email replies are part of my daily routines.

As long as I am doing my area of focus tasks and routines I am taking care of my most essential work each day. My major work. The work that will give me 80% of my results.

So knowing I have room for twelve additional tasks, when I do my weekly planning I can decide what needs to be done the following week.

Now, life is not that simple, of course. Through the day emergencies and urgencies will happen. They always do and you cannot plan for those. You just have to deal with them as they come up. You just have to have the flexibility to deal with those.

Now the beauty of the Time Sector System is you stop thinking in terms of what you get done each day, you start thinking in terms of what you get accomplished each week. So, if an emergency occurs and you get none of your planned tasks done one day, you can do a daily planning session and reschedule those tasks for other days in the week.

This week, for example, I could not prepare this podcast script on Tuesday because of a family trip. I saw that on Monday evening when I did my daily planning and rescheduled the podcast script to Thursday morning. It meant Thursday was busier than usual, but I was able to find the additional ninety minutes by waking up a little earlier than usual.

Having the freedom to shuffle tasks around on a daily basis allows me to be more flexible about when I do my tasks. Obviously, if a task needs to be done by Tuesday morning it needs to be done on Monday, but not all your Monday tasks will have the same tight deadline. Some may be just moving a project forward task and could be done later in the week if you don’t have enough time to complete it on the day you’d like to do it.

But the key to all this is learning to prioritise. You cannot do everything and you will always have more tasks on your to-do list than you could complete in a day or week and those tasks will keep coming. It’s like email. You can get yourself to inbox zero and within twenty minutes you’ve got a full inbox again.

So the real decision you have to make is which of all these tasks are you going to do. You cannot change the amount of time you have and so, you have to decide what tasks you will do and which ones you will not.

Of course, you could change that third variable—your energy levels, but quite often that involves time. You need to get plenty of sleep and you need to be exercising to increase your energy levels, so you still need to find a balance.

One pointless complaint is to complain about a lack of time. You don’t have a lack of time. You have the same amount of time as everyone else. Complaining about time is looking at things the wrong way round. You have too many tasks and you can always reduce that number by saying “no” to new inputs.

One way to help you is to monitor how you are using your time each day:

How much time do you spend ‘chatting’ with your friends through chat apps?
How much time do you spend on social media during the day?
How much time do you spend chatting with your co-workers?
How much time do you spend going through message threads in Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist?
How often do you “check” email and not do anything with it?
How much time do you spend searching the internet for things to buy?
How much time do you spend looking through your to-do list looking for something easy to do?

All these are huge time sucks and can take up a disproportionate amount of time each day. It’s surprising how many minutes can be lost getting sucked into a message thread and how much of a time waste it can be when the message thread does not concern you.

There are enough videos, articles and books on say no to new inputs, tasks and projects. Of course, you can always ignore that advice and carry on doing what you are already doing. You can keep trying new apps, rearranging your Notion pages and watching more videos on productivity in the hope that you will find a way to miraculously do your work without changing anything. Or you can change right now and work on the only thing you can work on. Prioritising.

So, how do you prioritise?

Again, know your limitations. How much can you comfortably do each day? You cannot do everything in one day, so you need to choose what you do. This is where the 2+8 Prioritisation method can help. That gets you to choose your two objectives for the day—the two absolutely must-do tasks and eight other focus tasks, or “should do” tasks that you will do everything you can to complete.

In my research, the optimum number of meaningful tasks anyone can complete in a day is ten. By meaningful I mean tasks that move projects and issues forward and take more than twenty minutes to do.

Focusing on getting ten meaningful tasks done each day does two things. The first is it focuses you on your MITs—your most important tasks and secondly it forces you to be realistic. When you know you are only allowed to schedule a maximum of ten tasks each day, you have no choice but to prioritise and say no.

These ten tasks do not include your routines, those just have to be done and routine tasks can be done anytime. Cleaning your house, washing the car and taking the dog for a walk can be done anytime.

I take my dog out for two walks a day. So, I do a session of focused work for a couple of hours in the morning and then take the little one out for his morning walk as a break for me and a walk for him. That way, I am completing my routine tasks in between my 2+8 tasks.

You can tell me you cannot say “no” to your boss or your clients and that may very well be true. But if the amount of work you have said “yes” to is greater than the time you have available what can you do? You cannot do anything about the time available—that’s fixed. The only variable is the amount of work you have said “yes” to. That’s the only part of the equation you can change.

So if you really want to consistently complete your assigned tasks for the day, get real about the number of tasks you are trying to complete each day. Time available is non-negotiable for all of us, the number of tasks we perform each day is negotiable so focus on that side of the equation. Reduce your commitments, say “no” to new inputs wherever you can, avoid time sucks like chat threads, social media and reorganising your lists.

Focus on your ten meaningful tasks per day. Get them done as soon as you can so you have the time to deal with the emergencies and unplanned events that will crop up each day.

And remember, if you have planned your week, not completing everything you planned to do one day, can always be moved off to another day that week.

I hope that has helped, Juan and thank you for your question.

Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need to do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.

It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.