Have you ever felt overwhelmed or disorganized in life, whether at work or at home? Time management is one area of life we all struggle with.
You will hardly go a day without hearing someone say, “I don’t have time.” A lot of us have tried hard to find a solution to this thing.
The one common solution which most of us have come across is working from a to-do list. They tell you this will help to get your life more organized, but these lists often have a negative connotation to them.
Let’s say you pick up a piece of paper and a pen tackle this mess. What usually happens is that either you get so overwhelmed with these tasks on your list or you make the list and get stuck with how to execute it.
Sometimes, this leaves you feeling worse than you did before. In all honesty, a to-do list can work for you, but if not used effectively, they can make you more disillusioned. Most people find that this list doesn’t work because; looking at what needs to be done on the list gets them overwhelmed. They don’t know how to set priorities. How then do you make a to-do list work?
Categorize To-Do List
In order not to have your brain overwhelmed by having a list of many options, separate them into different categories, and ensure you have fewer than 8 items on each one. Give each category a title that best works for you.
Add Estimations to To-Do List
It is not enough to know what you need to do, you also need to know how long it will take in order to plan effectively. The moment you look at an item on your list, you need to know how long it will take to execute it. So, add a column to your list showing the timeframe for each item.
Prioritize To-Do List
Of course, you want to work on tasks that are important and urgent, but select items based on importance and not urgency. If you don’t do this, you may end up neglecting other important tasks.
Review To-Do List
In order to make a to-do list work effectively for you, you need to make it a daily effort that you use to manage your time, and you need to review it regularly.
There is no point if you have the list comprising of everything that you need to do, but you don’t utilize it effectively to manage your time. You can have your review at the end of the day or the end of the week, depending on how you set your list – maybe it’s a daily list or a weekly list.
