How I Fixed My Messy Task List

One of the things that has made the biggest difference in my life and productive work output is getting really organized with my daily tasks.

I used to be a ‘write down your list for the day on a piece of paper’ kind of guy, and when I made the step up to using an organized digital task list on Todoist, everything elevated. Using a good tool is great, but what’s more helpful is designing a system so that your using that tool is a process that’s simple, consistent, and easy to maintain. For years I’ve been able to create a hierarchy of tasks based on importance and urgency, and it has radically improved my daily productivity and focus. I’ve got a video explaining how it works linked in the description if you want to check it out.

What I wanted to talk about today though, is how things went haywire recently...

The system I devised is basically this: 1) Put all of the things that come up throughout the day in one central location, 2) Categorize those things all at once at the end of the day into the appropriate places and assign them their relative urgency and importance.

The system works if you’re consistent maintaining it, and it becomes very overgrown if you don’t.

I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but a few months ago I missed a week of categorizing tasks… So the list added up. It became too much to do casually at once, so I avoided it, and the list got longer. Before I knew it, it was completely out of control.

It took longer than I’d like to admit, but eventually I dedicated an hour to biting the bullet and getting through it to get caught up. And it was only once I finished that I realized I could have tried a different solution.

Rather than committing to organizing all of my undesignated tasks at the end of the day, I could have taken chunks out of it. Like organizing 5 or 10 tasks a day at minimum. This would slowly put a dent in the list until I got all caught up.

And that’s the lesson I learned: The next time I get behind on organizing my task list, I can implement this new 'piece by piece' strategy. I’m confident this will help me solve the problem faster, get my systems working better, and accelerate my progress.

It also opened my eyes to the unconscious tendency I have to do things ‘all or nothing’. If it showed up here, where else might it be showing up, and where else might this be a solution to a problem I’m currently experiencing.

That’s how I approach my improvement! And hopefully it’s helpful to get a tactical glimpse into it. If you want to see how the productivity system I’ve built and use for myself works in more detail, I call it my Every Day Productivity Machine. I have a video showing you the system linked here.