We are all have things to do every day. Each of us follows different strategies to plan our day. Otherwise we may fail in our exams or lose our job because of the lack of time management. The very first method of planning the day is creating to-do-lists in which we convert our duties to the action items. It is easy, all we need is a pen and a piece of paper. We can quickly queue the things to do. In general, number of items need to be done is greater of our one day activity count. Somehow we have to categorize them. There is well-known method called as Eisenhower matrix to prioritize your tasks. It is a very logical method focuses the importance or urgency of the items. I assure you it simplifies your life to identify the most vital part of you activity database. So far, the picture of having to-do-list seem like quite efficient right? But we are missing out something…
Most of the time, listing the activities and prioritizing them is performed quite faster. Since we have lots of things to we feel like we need to quickly plan and start. And we group them only considering the factor of important or urgent. Every morning we list items, we prioritize and we do. List, prioritize and do. We live in a loop. Yes we have progress on something. But we are unaware of the big picture. How often we stop and question about the “things” we do?
More recently, I watched a TEDx Talk of Rory Vaden who is the author of the book of Procrastinate on Purpose. He was talking about something different then in usual. Rather than, focusing on importance and urgency of tasks he draws attention for a new term “significance”. According to Mr.Vaden we should spend time on things today that will give us more time tomorrow. At first look, it looks ordinary but do we really think about the significance of the tasks in our list. To work on only significant tasks we need to consider those three stage before we start to work on something: Elimination, automation, delegation. Details of this process can be found in this TED Talk.
The point which I want to take your attention is to think about to to-list. Every time we say yes to something, actually we say no to so many things. Having a to-do-list does not makes you successful in the life. You need to carefully question your tasks and define the significance level considering your purpose of life and values. To think and then do your list.