5 Steps To Make To-Do Lists Actually Work

Hi, I'm George Kao. So in this short video, I want to talk to you about why to do lists so often don't work and what we can do to make sure that they work much better for us. So one of the key challenges for to do lists is that they're all listed in one column usually, and they all look like they're equally important. But the truth, of course, we know that not all tasks are equally important. Some things will make a much bigger difference in our life and in our business than other tasks that we accomplish. Right. A lot of things are busy work. So the first tip I want to give you for to do lists is to make sure you are prioritizing in some way. Now, there are very complicated systems for prioritizing, like list something A, B, C, and then a one, a two, a three, that kind of thing. I think it's too complicated. I think very simply to prioritize is to look at your to do list and just pick out, as you look down your to do list, pause when you see something like, okay, that would make me feel really proud to accomplish today and that it's doable today. Okay. Or at least it's doable to take the next reasonable step. Okay. All right. What's the next thing that makes me feel proud that I will, if I accomplish today, it will make me feel proud and that it's doable today or that there's some action I can take today for the next doable step. And then what's the third one? So if you simply prioritize the top three things that you could accomplish that would make you feel proud. And by the way, that's the Pacific Ocean. Then it's, then you get to work, Then you don't do it. Because one of the challenges with to do lists is that because of the visual overwhelm of it, like, it's just a whole list of things that you haven't gotten done, it easily overloads our brains and keeps us from doing things, accomplishing things. So make your prioritization really simple. Just what are the top three things that would make me feel most proud that are doable? Some action today. Okay, that's number one. Number two, of course, is what I said, some action. I mean, most to do items are intimidating to look at because they're not something we can do right now. There's some kind of end vision or there's some kind of really big task. And so the second tip I want to give you is to make sure you rewrite that to do item or put a note under it. Like the next very doable step for this project. Really for this task, the next very doable step that I can do today is. And then you write that down. So that's the second tip. The third tip is once you have prioritized your top three things for today, write these three things on a separate blank area, separate blank document, separate blank piece of paper. But isolate these top three things so that it's not competing with all the other unimportant, less important things on your to do list. Because again, one of the biggest mistakes people do with to do lists is that they just keep looking at this long list of unfinished things and that's psychologically unhelpful for you to get things done. So I'm going to include more notes in more ideas, more tips in the notes of this video. I hope these simple ideas are helpful for you thus far. As always, I'm open to your questions and your comments. And until the next video, I wish you well.