One problem that many procrastinators seem to face is not planning ahead. When you don’t have a plan for each day, you’ll be much more likely to put things off because you’ll never feel a sense of urgency to get anything done.
A daily task list helps to keep you on track with your goals. It also creates a feeling of importance for each task, which will push you to work harder towards completing everything.
To get you started, let’s create a daily task list for you:
1. First, sit down with a pen and paper (don’t use the computer for this!) and write down everything you do, or need to do, in a week’s time. If you want to plan ahead for next week, then write down everything you have to get done next week. Just make a simple, unnumbered list.
It is important that you write down everything, no matter how minute it seems. Write it all down—everything from brushing your teeth to job tasks. If it has to be done, write it down.
2. After you’ve listed every single thing you need to do next week, you’re ready to do triage.
During this second stage of the process, you are going to reread your list and eliminate any unnecessary tasks.
First, go back through your list and see if there are any tasks that are glaringly needless. Most of the time, you’ll automatically be able to point them out with no problem at all. If you see tasks that seem to be unnecessary, just draw a line through them to mark them out.
Now that you’ve done this quick process of elimination, it’s time for the dirty work. Of the remaining tasks on your list, which ones take up too much of your time? Which ones do you end up wasting time on, when they really aren’t all that important? Cross them off your list.
What we are doing here is paring down your list to get to the bare bones. The only tasks we want on your list are the ones that are truly important and necessary to your daily existence—in both your personal life and your career.
If you work from home, doing this is probably more important to you. Your time is even more precious and is probably more difficult to manage. Working from the comfort of home tends to make one just a tad bit lazier than the next person. Eliminating these unnecessary tasks will help free up more of your time to work on building your business.
3. Prioritize your new task list. Now that you have eliminated all the time suckers from your task list, you can prioritize your new list.
First, if your task list is a weekly one, break it down into a daily task list. Many times you’ll have repetitive tasks, and then a few extra ones. That’s fine.
Take your daily task list and give each task a number, with 1 being the most important task on your list. No two tasks should have the same number.
After you’ve completed your task prioritization, take another look at your list. If you think some tasks need to be rearranged then do that now. Keep rearranging the tasks until they are in order of importance to you.
Now you have a list of your daily tasks. These must be done every single day. If something doesn’t look right, or if you realize you forgot a task or two, change your task list as needed.
This isn’t something that is written in stone. Rather, your daily task list is flexible and should be changed and updated as needed.
