Creating Goals, Setting To Do Lists, and Scheduling Tasks

There is a lot of advice on productivity.

The main piece of advice I can give on such after working with thousands of people, is that different strategies as it pertains to daily to-do schedules will work for different people.

There is no one secret to creating wants, to-do’s, tasks, scheduling your calendar, etc.

Some people will do the following such as write down a list of goals like I want to be a millionaire by such and such date, they write in detail with their why attached, or they create to do lists every night before they go to sleep about what they will do the next day.

Many of those may have worked for you. Those all have their place.

But, there is one method of task writing that has worked better for me than most.

You want to have a list of long term goals. Believe it or not many of these will come true. They just don’t usually operate on your timeline.

If you estimate something will take a year, it might take 5 years. Don’t get too discouraged if you haven’t achieved the goal yet.

Every morning you want to focus on what you can control for the day.

The goal is not to write down everyt task you’d like to do today.

First, it doesn’t account for what will provide you with results.

Second, you will want to accomplish a lot more things than you have the time for.

Third, things may pop up during the day you don’t account for.

Fourth, what you feel in the morning may change from what you feel in the afternoon about what is priority and not.

It is far easier to focus on things you can control rather than abstract goals, especially ones that take a long time.

Visions are important. They pull you to your ultimate destination. If you want to control something a year or 20 years out, it generally doesn’t work in my case. Writing down I want $x amount of money attached to a timeline I set has failed me many times.

So, a far better way to get the goal is typically around setting tasks that I can control that form high quality habits.

Separating my tasks into three columns for the day has helped me.

#1 – Priority Goals – These are limited to a few tangible goals you want to achieve for the day. Sometimes this is hard. You want to focus on a result. Closing a deal. Getting a sale. Even if a 24 hour day is an arbitrary to the goal, your brain is still in the right place of what’s most important.

#2 – Priority Tasks – This is a bucket that breaks down what tasks will lead to the goals above. Focus on tasks that lead to the goal.

#3 – Burner Tasks – These are tasks that seem like good ideas but are really just thoughts and ideas you have that may work or may not work. They aren’t actually required to achieve goals but they would be fun to do, and some of these ideas are really good ideas. Finishing every task your brain comes up with is futile. It’s a lofty goal to try to complete all the tasks you want to do.

If you run a business, I would also focus on another box.

This would be about which deals and leads are most important to work on.

Remember, business is about serving customers. So you want your business to focus on which customers you are serving and which leads you are focusing on.

Hopefully this helps you out in terms of organizing your day.

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