Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Tackling your to-do list

Ok so this week I found a blog that was fairly insightful to me. It was on tackling a to do list. I find that I have a hard time at this and I think it is partly because my mind wanders around and I get an idea or thought and next thing I know I am off to the races on something completely different than what I was just doing. So this guy talks about 8 strategies to help getting your list done and I think I am going to try and put this into practice.

1       Priority
The idea is this, the whole list is not a priority and just doing the things on the list and marking them as done does not necessarily determine your progress, focus on priorities.

2       No second thoughts
Do not overthink things or starting your project. Jump right in and get it going. This is by far one of my not so good qualities, I tend to overthink everything and make it far more difficult than it needs to be.

3       Limit distractions
This is another biggie for me as I can easily get sidetracked. Focus on the task at hand. Whatever that something is that is distracting you now can be taken care of later.

4       Learn from mistakes
I am a proponent of this and I think it is key no matter what environment. Mistakes are unavoidable, it’s what you do with them or about them that counts. Learn from them and move on.

5       Set a short-term goal
Making a goal helps to force us to get things done.

6       Break big activities into small pieces
Do not overwhelm yourself because of the size of the task, big problems are best solved by breaking them down into smaller, easier manageable tasks.

7       Fire the perfectionist
Do not demand perfection because rarely if ever is it going to be or ever will be perfect. He quotes Voltaire who warned against letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. You will never make a perfect decision.

8       Think about it
Very important. Replace counterproductive thoughts with positive ones that help motivate and keep you on track.






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