Getting control of your life and knowing which tasks to do is one of the most useful skills you can learn.

It doesn’t matter if you can work 12 straight hours unless you know why you are doing it.

Learning how to prioritize your tasks is the natural intersection between short term planning and long term planning and it helps beating procrastination because you are always using your energies on what matter the most to you.

Fortunately it’s easy to know what’s important to do if you follow these steps:

  1. Focus on the essential. You can have great results if you focus on a few things at a time an do them well.
  2. Order your tasks. Ask yourself which of your tasks would have the biggest impact on your goals if it was already done, and put it on the top of your list. Do the same for all your tasks.
  3. Un-clutter your list. It’s a good idea to go through your list and once again remove all the superfluous and time consuming tasks that adds little or no value to you.
  4. Start at the top. Now it’s time to finally take action. Do the most important thing at the top of your list and work your way down till the bottom.
  5. Keep a timer. It’s a good idea to track how much you are working, unless of course you want to work from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed.
  6. Set a time limit. Or better yet, use the pomodoro technique.
  7. Log your results. I keep track on paper of the tasks I did during the day and I put them in a special folder in the evening. I found it useful to revisit my files after a while to see if I’m making some kind of progress, or to see if what I was doing was worth it.

Keep in mind that this process is really simple in reality and you should focus on it only 5 minutes a day, and take action in the remaining time.

An example of todo list

Here’s a practical example of todo list I made this morning for the entire day:

- Watch paid to exist seminar
– Business planning
– Work on blog template
– Work on priorities post
– Think of a new guest post
– Comment on other blogs

As you cas see, I only had 6 tasks on my todo list for today, but those are all high value activities for me.

On other days I would probably spend more time focusing on other areas of my life, but for today, that’s all.

I also ordered my tasks in a way that felt natural for me. I started with an easy task which took me around 30 minutes to complete, but then I moved to the one where I wanted to have the maximum concentration and energy.
The last one, commenting on other blogs, is something that I can easily do in the evening if necessary, because I don’t need all my energies and I can relax enjoying content while creating relationships with other people.

Moral of the story

This post covered the basics of time management. Still, consciously applying the tips presented here can make a great difference in the long term, and it helps avoiding those times when you feel stuck and don’t know what to do.

Time management tip for businesses: Consider installing time and attendance software for you and your employees. Once your tasks are prioritized, this is an excellent way of tracking the hours spent on each individual project, and will save a great deal of time that could be lost attempting to play catch-up.