Do you have a growing task list of things that never get done? You’ll need to learn to recognize 4 simple items that you shouldn’t bother adding to your lists.
The One-Minute Task. If your system for tracking tasks has a lot of overhead, you may find yourself spending more time managing a task than the task takes to complete. Enter the task, set its due date and category, fiddle with the color and context, prioritize it, decide where it fits on various lists…and then it only takes 30 seconds to actually file that invoice in the proper folder in the filing cabinet. While you may get a warm fuzzy feeling from checking “completed,” next time just file the invoice without the overhead of creating and managing the task. (You might also consider switching to a tracking system with less overhead).
Another task worth leaving out: Create task list.
4 Task List Antipatterns – [WebWorkerWeekly]
Yep, a while ago I decided to keep my master tasks list (in Highrise) for things that are going to directly make me money – billable work or pitching.
But I do still need to remind myself to file invoices or whatever so that gets scribbled in a list in my notebook, along with the smaller steps towards completing projects.
I agree, so many times people spend an hour or two in the morning building a task list for that day when if they would have just started plugging through it they would have it 80% done at that point and could focus more on the bigger time consuming projects for the rest of the day.