Summary – To-Do List equals Prioritize & Results
I’m sure everyone can agree that one of the best tools for productivity is the To-Do list. All productivity gurus recommend it. In fact, it is considered as the foundation of productivity by some. Generally, a To-Do list is a system in which you will list down all the tasks needed to be done. Once a task is completed, it will be written off from the list. It’s as simple as that.

However do you know that To-Do list can be further improved to maximize productivity? Here are 7 tricks I personally implement that you might find useful.

1) Write this sentence at the top of your To-Do list

“It is never about how many left, it is about how many accomplished”

How many times have you been so happy that you have completed a lot of the tasks listed, but by the time you are about to celebrate, another set of tasks occupy the list. If your focus everyday is to clear that list, you will be frustrated everyday.

That is why it is always better to focus on the number of tasks completed instead of number of tasks left on the list. Believe me, it will make a lot of difference in our motivation level once our perception on the concept of a To-Do list changed.

2) Keep a record (The Done List)

Based on the same philosophy, I would recommend you to keep a record of the tasks completed. Make another list if you can – The Done list. Any tasks you have written off from your To-Do list, put them in this list. This list will serve as a reminder to you that you can be productive if you want. It will also help boost that declining motivation almost immediately.

If motivation is not a problem to you, at least take pride in your work. You deserve it.

3) Set points and its corresponding rewards

This tip is actually one of my favorites. I put points to all my tasks on the To-Do list. The most urgent tasks will be given 10 points, while the less important ones will be given 5 points. The tasks which are not important are given 0 points. Yes, Zero. I will tell you why shortly.

I will then set a target and its corresponding rewards. For example, if I ever reached 5000 points, I will treat myself with a one day leave. Of course you can make this more interesting by allowing further accumulation of the points. It’s your rule.

The reason I give the least important task a zero is because I have experimented before by giving it 1 points. I end up avoiding doing all the urgent tasks and just focus on these trivia tasks. That itself is an example of a To-Do list went wrong.

4) Make it ugly

I have a friend who actually decorate her To-Do list. She actually writes with such beautiful handwriting on a beautiful piece of paper. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the kind of paper I used to write love letter on. But that’s another story. In the end, her To-Do list is not getting any shorter and she is more stressful than ever.

I have nothing against beautifully written work. But for a To-Do list, I would recommend you to write with your worst handwriting ever (Of course it must be readable too). The whole purpose of a To-Do list is to cross the items off. By making it ugly, you are subconciously pushing yourself to finish the tasks as soon as possible. Who would want to have an ugly written list unchanged for a year?

5) Use paper with lines

I once used a whiteboard as my To-Do list. It was a bad idea. Since there was no lines to separate the tasks, I often just squeezed the new task in between the existing tasks. By the end of the day, the whiteboard was filled with incomprehensible words.

Use paper with lines for your To-Do list. Nothing is more frustrating that a board full of tasks but you can’t read it.

6) Make the list short

Now that you are using paper with lines, why not limit your To-Do list further by having only 10 tasks on each paper. It is very tempting to have a very long list. But the truth is, a short list is better in term of efficiency and simplicity. Here are a few additional reasons why a short list is always better.

• Easy to scan through anytime.

• Highlight the most important task immediately.

• More satisfying when you write off a task.

• Having completed one paper of tasks will give you an extra boost of motivation.

• You are always eager to free up some space on your paper by completing the task.

A suggestion, go through your To-Do list and find tasks that can be delegated. Write that off. Now find other tasks that can just be eliminated. You should by now have reduced the length of your To-Do list by half. Congratulation!

7) Take three tasks out (Literally)

Remember your To-Do list with ten tasks? Now tear the top three tasks and immediately complete the tasks. Instead of crossing off tasks after you complete it, you are now doing it the other way around. If three tasks is too much, you can always choose just the one. It will help if the tasks torn are your most important tasks of the day.

There is only one rule to this technique. You must complete the task by all means. Once you allow yourself to procrastinate or rewrite the tasks again tomorrow, it will immediately become a habit. You don’t want that.

/end list

Conclusion

There are so many ways you can improve your To-Do list, but it will not work if you don’t understand the fundamental of a To-Do list. A To-Do list is meant to help you prioritize which tasks are more important. The list will also be useless if you avoid completing all the tasks.

- I Wonder -
Any other tricks you might want to share with the rest of the readers?

———– Personal Note ————-
My first computer got infected by virus almost monthly. I could put up with a virus that shows funny message once in a while, but this virus slowed my computer to a near halt. As a result, I formatted my computer every month. Fortunately, I had prepared a To-Do list on the steps to be taken immediately after a computer format. The list contained what softwares to install, what were the settings etc. Ah the good times.

Photo Credit – Purpleslog

Don't want to miss a single tip? Get updates via RSS (Full) or Email

Related Post

• 7 Tips To Remind You Of Your Goals
• The 5 Unspoken Laws of Parkinson’s Law
• The Most Productive One Hour In Your Life
• Integrating Gmail Into Your Mind In 5 Steps
• Get Things Done For Student – Emergency Use Only

Summary – Remember & Be Super Productive.

Pop quiz

There is a guy who loves productivity tips. He reads every single tips on all productivity blogs and half of the time he is one of the most productive person on the planet.

The question is – What happened to another half of his time?

Procrastination? Nah.. He must have memorized all the tricks to overcome procrastination. Fall sick? Maybe but nobody can be productive when they are sick, so that excuse is acceptable.

The Real Answer

He simply forgets to be productive.

You may not notice it, but forgetfulness is one of the hidden enemy of productivity. Just look at our annual resolution. It’s almost the end of the year now, ask yourself, how many have actually been fulfilled? There will usually be a lot of resolution left unfulfilled. For some they have totally forgotten that they even have one.

Another example to illustrate how forgetfulness is productivity number 1 killer is handling our finance. We have read all there is to know about financial management such as how to save that emergency money, how to avoid impulsive buying etc but usually when we really want something, we will just buy it. This can only happen if we forget the whole idea of financial management. The worse case scenario would be when we deliberately forget all the tips.

How To Be Reminded Of Things & Goals

The only way we can overcome forgetfulness is simply to remind ourselves all the time. Listed below are a few simple ways to actually do that.

1) Make use of screensaver. Why on earth are we displaying piping lines as our screensaver. What good will that do. Put up encouraging words such as “It’s been at least 5 minutes since you do anything, do something now!!”

2) Constantly edit your wallpaper by listing down your priorities. I need to have pictures as my wallpaper. So what I did is to edit the pictures using Gimp to list down my top 5 goals in life (Beautifully written of course)

3) Set alarm for your work. After a while you will need to have a break. What I would recommend you to do is to set an alarm on your computer to ensure you will be able to get back to work promptly.

I suggest an online alarm clock – Kukuklok.com. You can set what kind of alarm noise you want from cockerel, classic clock, electronic and slayer guitar. Make sure you max out the volume of your speaker. That should work. If not, your spouse will threaten you to start working just to make the noise stop.

The simpler way is of course to set up the alarm on your cellphone.

4) Install ReminderFox extension to your Firefox. This is especially for those who use Firefox as their browser. You can install this extension (ReminderFox)and organize how you want to be reminded.

5) Paste reminders on the wall. I remember a scene from the movie – Hollow Man where the scientist had pasted a note reminding him to get back to work on the ceiling. Whenever he is getting sleepy or is lying on the bed, he will immediately see that note. I’m not sure whether he gets back to work after that or just ignore the reminder. But still, it’s one of the most efficient way to remind yourself.

Some other interesting places to paste the note is in your wallet, at the steering wheel of your car or on top of your television. The rule is to place it at the most viewed place throughout the day.

6) Use unwritten reminder. Pasting notes to remind ourselves is a great idea but when you have a few thousand things to remember, your house may not need the new repainting (It will be covered with that small notes pasted on the wall)

What you should try to do is to associate the things you see everyday to your list of things to remember. For example, I will always be reminded to check whether I’m out of gas whenever I come across a gas station while driving.

Try this with everything else. The best things you can do is to associate seeing money with saving. Imagine, seeing money and you immediately save it. You will be rich.

7) Ask a friend to remind you. Ask for help from your friends to remind you of your goals. For example, make it a habit to bring your friend when you go shopping. This friend is assigned to deter you from buying. Maybe by telling you it’s too expensive or it looks ugly on you.

If you have such friends, sticking to your budget or resolution will be easier. If you do have such friends, cherish them well.

- I wonder -
Any other ideas on how to be reminded of things or your goals?

———- Personal Note ———–
When I was 16 years old, I wrote my goals on the inside of my wardrobe. One of the goals include being a master in martial art. Of course, my fellow friends found out about my goals and they made fun of the goals. That in a way had deterred me partially from pursuing my goals.

Lesson learnt – ditch those friends.

Photo Credit – Mhatma

Don't want to miss a single tip? Get updates via RSS (Full) or Email

Related Post

• 7 Tricks To Spice Up Your To-Do List
• The 5 Unspoken Laws of Parkinson’s Law
• The Most Productive One Hour In Your Life
• Integrating Gmail Into Your Mind In 5 Steps
• Get Things Done For Student – Emergency Use Only

Summary – How Parkinson’s Law helps you get things done.

I’ve learnt about Parkinson’s Law way back when I was a student. Back then it was just like any other things that came out from my lecturer’s mouth – Incomprehensible meaningless words. There’s nothing wrong with him or his lectures, it’s just me. I’ve learnt my lesson though.

Parkinson’s Law if used correctly, will ensure that any work that need to be done WILL be done. If the deadline is 1 hour, you will finish it in 65 minutes top. Interested?

Parkinson’s Law – The What

Parkinson’s Law says that – Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

It basically means that if you are supposed to write a 10 pages report and you set the deadline to be 2 days. It will most probably be finished in 2 days. According to Parkinson, the work will expand itself to adjust to the deadline you have set. You will start feeling the need for a more thorough research about the topic, maybe an interview or a good time spent googling. The simple 10 pages work has now expand itself to fill up the vacancy in the 2 days period.

Now that is an example of a really motivated and productive guy. Imagine what will happen to a person whose nickname is The Laziest Person On The Planet. He will start surfing the internet, watching television in the name of research, take few long nap to refresh his mind from God knows what. In the end, the 10 pages report will still only be finished after the 2 days deadline (even though based on the attitude, it will be very unlikely)

Exactly after 2 days, both of them (productive guy and lazy guy) will claim that the work done is very hard and it requires the full 2 days just to finish it.

Now this is where it become interesting. Try assigning the same work to another guy and set the deadline to be only 1 day. I can guarantee you that the work will still be finished by the deadline with almost no difference in quality (Of course we are comparing between two productive guys)

The Unspoken Law of Parkinson’s Law

1) Know the limits of low and high.
You cannot finish writing a 10 pages report in 10 minutes. That is stretching the law and you will only end up more frustrated, tense and most probably become another statistic of hypertension cases.

Experiment with the law. Let say you manage to finish the report in 2 days. Bravo! now let’s try 1.5 days. Do this until you know for certain what’s your low and high limit to Parkinson’s Law

2) Keep track.
This is actually covered in point number 1, but I think it is so important that it deserve a number too. Always keep track when you are doing the experiment. It will be a waste of time when you have done all the experiment to get your optimized deadline data but forget all about it in a year or two. Keep a book, and record everything until you can have the following conversation with your client

Client – Can you optimize the SEO of my blog for me?
You – Not a problem.
Client – When can I expect it to be finished?
You – 47 minutes.

3) Buy a timer
Now why do we need a timer when we are this motivated? The reason is because there is an unmotivated section of your mind which is equally strong, and usually it is so much smarter than your motivated section.

When you are doing your work, your unmotivated section of your mind will start to sabotage the process. Typical example is when you start to forget how much time you still have before the deadline. This is where the timer comes in. Set the sound of the timer to be as refreshingly painful as possible.

A no brainer but really, why we bother come up with a deadline if we have no idea where we are at anytime.

4) Answer to someone.
Find yourself a few friends to help you. Give them the authority to check on your progress. Now imagine that they are THE boss. I’m very sure that the work will be finished in no time. It always work for me (But with real boss)

Email them the details of your work. Maybe ask them to call you after every one hour and you must report how many pages have been done. Of course you will need to reimburse the call charges later.

The only problem with this is when the boss apprently is the laziest person in the group. You know what to do right? Fire your boss. This is the only time in your life you will be able to do this

5) Know other forms of work expansion
You set the deadline for two days, and you finish it in one. By right you have proven Parkinson wrong and that the work is not expanding. However the work does expand but this time it will be in other forms such as anxiety (wondering what if the report is rejected), or no satisfaction (You feel like starting over) or tense (arghhh)

By knowing this fact, you can save yourself a lot of therapy session in the future.

And by knowing all the 5 unspoken laws, you are finally ready to experience the full benefit of Parkinson’s Law. In another word.. your work is guaranteed done.

- I wonder -
Care to share your techniques to get things done?

———— Personal Note —————
The previous 1 week has been a very hectic week for me. VIPs were visitting the mill and you know that number infinity people keep talking about. I have that exact number of works need to be done

That was when I remembered this technique. Now the number of balance work I need to do is roughly infinity minus a few hundres.

Photo Credit – laffy4k

Don't want to miss a single tip? Get updates via RSS (Full) or Email

Related Post

• 7 Tricks To Spice Up Your To-Do List
• 7 Tips To Remind You Of Your Goals
• The Most Productive One Hour In Your Life
• Integrating Gmail Into Your Mind In 5 Steps
• Get Things Done For Student – Emergency Use Only

Summary – Super One Hour

If you are reading this, I’m very sure that you and I have the same common goal. We want to achieve more in our life. There’s only one problem though.

There are so many goals to achieve, better career, relationship, attitude, etc that sometimes they are very hard to keep track. Most of the time, we will end up spending more time on only a few areas like career and hobbies while totally neglecting other area like relationship etc.

Trying to maintain a balance between all our goals is really a headache. Planning them is known to even cause nausea and migraine. That is why I come up with this – The most productive one hour in your life.

Basically, it is a one hour schedule where you will set the things to do which will cover all the important aspect of our life. There is only one rule to this tool – You must do every single thing listed. Every single thing.

Let’s start shall we?

Preparation

• Switch off your handphone.
• Switch on your computer and connect to the internet
• Grab today’s newspaper and a timer

The Super One Hour starts now.

1) Knowledge – Read headline of newspaper (5 min)
Read the newspaper. For some this may already be a routine, but for another it is very hard to really sit down and read. For the latter, try reading the headline only. It will save you time. Make sure you know everything that is happening in your country, and ultimately in the world.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Read English newspaper to improve your English.
• Start with the half of the comic page and end with another half. Hopefully it will start your day with a smile and the news will be less depressing.
• Try to give out comments while you read. It will make remembering the details easier. For example “Ah, Malaysia has a chance at a Gold Medal. What’s his name again?”

2) Relationship – Give your loved ones a call (5 min)
Pick up the phone and call your spouse. Even if she is at work, call her. Ask her about her day and try to give a message to her that you appreciate her. You don’t need to be direct and say “I appreciate you”. Nobody says it like that. Say it without actually say it. Maybe you can say “Looks like you are busy, I’ll help later with the dishes.” After you’re done, swith off the phone. there should not be any distraction for the remaining task in this Super One Hour.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Spark the fire. Try to figure out what actually about you that she finds attractive. Use that considerably. If she finds you funnily charming. Be funnily charming.
• Help her with her stress. Don’t add to it.
• A classic snail mail once in a while is always romantic. Try it, she will like it.

3) Finance – Count how much money you actually have now (5 min)
Go get your bank account book, all of them, and start adding up all your savings and cash. Now ask yourself, “is that enough to cover your lifestyle for 6 months if you are suddenly fired from your job?”. This exercise will in a way make us realize our level of financial security.

If you say no to the question (which is usually the case), immediately write on a piece of paper how much more you need and paste it on the wall. From now on, everytime you deposit some money, deduct it from the amount you just wrote. Make it so that you can see how you progress to save that money.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Educate your family that financial planning is everybody’s responsibility (with an extra staring at the one who spends the most)
• Set up a contest to see who can save the most. The winner will win a month of no housechore. That will be irresistable even for me.

4) Social – Email a friend (5 min)
Login to your email account, and choose one friend that you haven’t email for some time. Send him an email saying hi. You can also send out messages to him/her by other means such as facebook, IM and so on.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Schedule to meet your friends at a coffee shop. Never meet your friend with an ulterior motive. One friend had invited me for a drink one day, and I happily went. Apparently he was trying to sell me an insurance policy. Spoilt my evening.
• Set up a text file containing all the details of your friend. You don’t want to be asking the same friend what he’s doing for a living 5 times, do you?

5) Declutter – Cut everything by 10% (5 min)
Choose one item today. It can be anything from your wardrobe or RSS Feed or email. If for example you choose your wardrobe, go through all your clothes, and if you have a total of 100 clothes, decide immediately which 10 are you going to give away. Maybe you can give the clothes to your brothers/sisters.

The idea of decluttering is to reduce or eliminate those that you don’t really need. If you have 3 chairs in your room and you only need one. why not move the 2 chairs to another room.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Look at your room. What is the one eye sore that can be removed. Remove that item for the day.
• Set up a specific place for everything. Place keys at a designated place. So whenever you are in a hurry and you want to look for your keys, you will know exactly where to find it.

6) Career – Sit down and plan your career. (5 min)
One thing about our career or work, is that after a while, everything will look like a routine thing. You wake up in the morning, and suddenly you are in your robot mode. Working that routine without ever thinking on how to advance in your career.

In this Super One Hour, sit down and plan your career. Think what can you do now that will result in a promotion or a raise. Personally for me, if I want to get promoted and noticed by the top management, I will have to pass First Grade Steam Engineer Certificate. Now that I know this, I should plan what exactly I’m going to do to pass that certificate.

Extra mini things you can do :

• Try looking for another job. Go for interview, even if you are not really planning to change your career. At least your interview skill will improve.
• Be more visible to the top management. If you don’t know how to sell yourself, people may not notice all your effort even if you are the best worker ever.

7) Health – Jog (25 min)
Put on your jogging shoes and start jogging for 20 minutes. I once read that in order for the body to start burning fat, you must be running at least 20 minutes. Any shorter than that, you are just warming up. Spend the last 5 minutes to cool down.

Jogging / exercising is also known to have a destressing effect. After all the work you have done before, you will definitely going to need this.

Extra mini thing you can do :

• Try to remember the news you read just now
• Plan your next Super One Hour while running. Which of your friend will you email next, or which life goals are you going to work on.

8] Spiriuality – Meditate (5 min)
You should by now all sweaty and tired. Sit down and meditate for 5 minutes. Just do the most basic meditation. Sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breathing in and out and think of nothing else. Forget everything you have done before, and try to taste the inhaling and exhaling breath you take.

Extra mini things you can do :

• There shouldn’t be anything else you should do in a meditation.

/end list

Conclusion – You can use my version of Super One Hour. But I recommend that you come up with your own version. One that has your sets of goals and things to do. Maybe you prefer swimming to jogging, or yoga to meditation.

The idea can also be expanded to maybe Super One Day or Super One Week. The possibilities are endless. Enjoy!

- I Wonder -
What other things you would advise one to put in the Super One Hour

Photo Credit – Fabiola Medeiros

Don't want to miss a single tip? Get updates via RSS (Full) or Email

Related Post

• 7 Tricks To Spice Up Your To-Do List
• 7 Tips To Remind You Of Your Goals
• The 5 Unspoken Laws of Parkinson’s Law
• Integrating Gmail Into Your Mind In 5 Steps
• Get Things Done For Student – Emergency Use Only