Five Best To-Do List Tip
As an entrepreneur, how can you be productive and ensure that you are focusing on the right areas? Being an entrepreneur, you don’t necessarily have a daily playbook to follow. Many entrepreneurs are breaking new ground and learning through trial and error. It can be daunting, and even a bit scary, to determine where to focus your energy on any given day. Should you have your team spend the day creating marketing copy for that new product, or reaching out to customers to get feedback on an existing product? It can feel as though there is never enough time to meet all the demands of the business.
One tool that many entrepreneurs use to get organized and improve focus is to create a To Do list. This can be a very helpful tool.
The Secret to a Successful To Do List
Here are some straight forward and easy to follow steps to creating a powerful and productive daily To Do list:
1. Keep it simple. Your To Do list should have NO MORE THAN THREE THINGS on it for a given day. Some of the most highly successful people I know only allow ONE ITEM on their To Do list each day. This is where the rubber meets the road on focus and prioritization.
2. Write your To Do list the night before. This helps you start your day with clarity. You know exactly which item you need to complete by 10am the next morning.
3. Tackle the first item on your list first thing in the morning when you are fresh. Now that you’ve effectively prioritized your To Do list, you need to get the biggest, most important task completed before moving on to anything else. You need to make yourself and your goals a priority. This starts by completing your most high level, strategic action FIRST, before checking your email or responding to phone calls or other requests. To be truly successful, you must be able to set boundaries and make your biggest strategic goals your daily priority.
4. If you have a hard time limiting your To Do list to a maximum of three items, or your mind keeps wandering off thinking about all the other things you “need to do,” I recommend doing a mind dump. Take five minutes, no more, and write down every single thing you can think of that you need to do in the next week. This can be personal or professional. Write it all down just to get it out of your head. Then put that list away. This is NOT your To Do list. This is a data dump, a psychic release. Your To Do list is the list of your 1-3 most important items that you created the night prior. Re-focus on this list after doing your mind dump by putting the mind dump list in a drawer and forgetting about it. If you aren’t taking action, worrying is just wasting your energy.
5. Sometimes small is big. Be strategic about your energy. Occasionally, a small and menial task that isn’t highly strategic will start to take up an incredible amount of mind space. There are things that you haven’t put on your To Do list but are bothering you. Maybe it’s that stain on your carpet at home, cleaning off your desk, doing that ROI analysis, or buying that late wedding present for a friend. Sometimes, a small To Do becomes a huge energy suck because we’ve put it off for so long that it truly bothers us. In that case, it is one of the three important things for you to do on that day because releasing all the anxiety you have built up will move you forward more than anything else. So, put it to your To Do list for tomorrow and do it.
If you follow these five steps, you will increase your productivity while decreasing your negative mind chatter. It’s a win/win.
Article Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessaloder/2014/06/02/five-best-to-do-list-tips/#61837ecd51b5
Image Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/to-do-list-tools.jpeg?t=1480279565666&width=669&height=277&name=to-do-list-tools.jpeg
VOCABULARY WORDS:
Entrepreneur (n) - a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk
Example: This Company is owned by a group of entrepreneurs.
Daunting, daunt, daunted (v) - To lessen the courage of discourage
Example: Don’t be daunted by the amount of work still to be done.
Menial (adj.) - lowly
Example: Do not focus on doing menial work but do your priorities instead.
Tackle (v) - To deal with to handle
Example: We are going to tackle some issues with the manager.
Strategic (adj.) – important in or essential to strategy
Example: We need to plan for strategic actions.
Anxiety (n) - distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune
Example: He felt anxiety about the possible loss of his job.
The rubber meets the road (idiom) - an important point for something the moment of truth
Example: An athlete can train all day, but the race is where the rubber meets the road and they'll know how good they really are.
Wandering off (idiom) - to go aimlessly, indirectly, or casually
Example: She is wandering off thinking about a lot of things to be done.
Mind dump or brain dump (idiom) - is a complete transfer of accessible knowledge about a particular subject from your brain to some other storage medium, such as paper or your computer's hard drive.
Example: We might need to do mind dumping to get away anxiety.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you make your everyday life productive?
2. Do you set or make your to-do list every day?
3. Do you accomplish the things you have on your to-do list?
4. In making your to-do list, which one do you prioritize?
5. In your own opinion, is making to-do list helpful in your job? Why do you say so?
