Situation
You have a to-do list. It’s long and seems to be growing longer by the minute. You’re working hard and yet your to-do list keeps growing. Let me show you how to shorten your to-do list without compromising it.
Background
A well-managed to-do list is an important tool. A simple list is perfectly fine. You might also want to consider a personal workflow management system such as the Getting Things Done system developed by David Allen.
And yet at times they can get out of control. In this article I will show you a simple technique for shortening a to-do list that has become too long to be useful.
It’s common for people to put too many tasks on their to-do lists. They add tasks more quickly than they complete them. The result is a to-do list that grows longer every day. It soon becomes unpleasant to use.
If this rings true for you, here’s how to make your to-list useful again.
What To Do
Classify Tasks On Your To-Do List
First, divide the your to-do list into three categories:
WIP: Critical tasks that are in work.
HOLD: Critical tasks you have not started.
DROP: Non-critical tasks that you will likely never complete.
Labeling your tasks in this manner – and dropping some – gives you a much more realistic view of what you can accomplish in the foreseeable future. You don’t need to agonize over tasks you drop. If they are truly important they will occur to you again. If that happens, you can shuffle the list again at that time.
Change How You Manage Your To-Do List
It’s possible, and even likely, that you have more projects in WIP than you can complete in a reasonable amount of time. Relabel these WIP tasks as HOLD. For a single person anything more than about four projects in work at a time is too many. Only you can know how many is too many, but it’s much better to have too few in work rather than too many. You’ll be surprised at how quickly things get moving again if you set your WIP (work-in-process) limits to be small.
Get everything labeled and make an agreement with yourself that you will not start a new project until an existing project in the WIP state is done. In other words, you have a fixed number of slots for WIP and HOLD tasks and you don’t violate them.
Bottom Line
If you have followed the procedure you now have a to-do list that is not only shorter but more useful to you.
With these changes you will now finish your critical tasks more quickly. This is because you will not be spreading your available effort across as many tasks.
And every time you finish a one critical task you can release another one from HOLD and change its status to WIP.
In the long run it is far more useful to finish the tasks you start than it is to start new tasks that are ultimately abandoned.
I hope this technique is useful to you.