Turn Your To-Do List From Your Enemy into Your Friend by Asking These 3 Prioritizing Questions

​Lengthy To-Do lists are paralyzing!

The endless list of tasks, all which seem important, blurs in front of us. Flabbergasted at the daunting chore of prioritizing, we play it safe. Many of us then default into checking email one more time. By averting the cursed To-Do list repeatedly, we not only get further behind but more and more disheartened.

​It's the norm for most of us
Ask any leader and you’ll likely hear a similar response. 

• My To-Do list never ends. 
• I’ll never get through it. 
• Just when I think I get caught up, all hell breaks loose. 

To-Do lists become the enemy. 

Stop fighting with your To-Do list
Rather than your To-Do list being your foe, let me show you how it can be your valuable assistant. By prioritizing your To-Do list into some semblance of order, it can become a tool working for you, instead of a threat against you. Last week  I walked you through a weekly planning session that had you develop a list of tasks for the upcoming week. Take the list you made and prioritize it by asking yourself the following 3 questions.

3 Questions to ask when prioritizing your To-Do list

1. Will this item move my/our annual goals or quarterly projects forward? 

We spent too much time focusing on urgent things. The pressing things are what appear to be dangerous fires. In reality, they are simply decoys. These seemingly critical duties keep us swamped and distracted from the work that is truly going to move us and our organization forward.

"I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

When we zoom out, getting a broader view of our To-Do items we see a different perspective. This refocusing allows us to see that sometimes a To-Do item that doesn't seem as urgent is actually a higher priority. Identify the items on your To-Do list that connect to your annual goals and quarterly projects. These should be moved up in higher on your list

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2. Does this To-Do list task need to be done before you can do something else or ahead of someone being able to begin his or her part? 

Some tasks sequentially build upon each other. You may need to do one element before the next. People may be waiting for you to complete your assignment before they can do their chunk. If you don’t do this thing, you become the bottleneck for a project moving forward. It might take you twenty 20 minutes, but it could set in motion a whole bunch of other things. 

Keep your eye out for little things fall into this category of being progressive tasks. You may have to break one task in two to see the full effect. For example, “Part A” might be scheduling a block of time into your agenda next week to work on a project.

Making “Part A" scheduling time a priority this week, you will give yourself the capacity to do “Part B”, working on the project, next week. If you don’t prioritize making an appointment with yourself, you will find that another week we’ll have gone by without finding time to work on the project.

​3. How does this task measure up with the energy and time slots I have available this week? 

Not all jobs are equal and not all segments of time on your calendar are alike. Some tasks require considerably more brainpower and sometimes the open slots in your agenda are times that you will have diminished brainpower. Be cognizant of how you match these two.  

For example, I strongly suggest not spending the first part of your morning on email. The first hour of your day is when you are most refreshed and typically are better able to tackle projects that require a higher degree of focus and concentration. When you are looking at prioritizing your To-Do list, and you notice that have a chunk of time early in your day, schedule the project that requires you have a high level of concentration and energy for it. 

If however, you have an hour at the end of your day available, slot in cleaning out your inbox at that time. Use lower energy times to return phone calls, have quick project update conversations with your team or putting papers or files in order.

​Make use of the questions
Use these 3 questions to prioritize your weekly To-Do list and your accompanying schedule. Look at what you realistically needs to get done this week and move it to the top of your list. The rest can stay on the list perhaps and get it done if you truly have the time. But make sure the top priorities get done first. How do you do that? You get done the priories items by then moving prioritizing your daily To Do’s.  

​3- minute daily prioritizing
At the beginning of each day, spend three minutes identifying the top three priority To Do items for that day. Yes, only three! 

It isn’t that you can only do those three things, rather those are the 3 mandatory things you must get done. 

Make a separate sticky note, highlight the To-Do’s, or in some way identify that they are your top three items for the day. Then, ensure that these things get done to the best of your ability before 11 AM.  

If you truly want to be more productive and successful at getting done the most important things, get your top three done every day.  When you do, you will find things move forward much quicker for you.

Putting it all together
Remember to look at last week’s post on planning.  In it, I walk you through the steps in how to pull out all of the To-Do’s items for in a weekly planning session. Each week, take your list and line it up against the following considerations: 

1. Will this item move my/our annual goals or quarterly projects forward? 
2. Does this To Do list task need to be done before I can do something else or ahead of someone being able to begin his or her part? 
3. How does this task measure up with the energy and time slots I have available this week? 

Follow the plan and find your friend
Use these questions to help you create a weekly To-Do list that assists you. Your To-Do list becomes your friendly reminder of what is truly important. Use it to guide you each day, to pull out your top three To-Do items you need to focus on. Follow these steps and your peers will be wondering how suddenly you are accomplishing so much!

Question: What were your top 3 To-Do items for today?