Overwhelming Task List? A Possible "Relief Valve" Option for Outlook and Gmail / Google Task Users

Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, Email Sanity Expert. Uh, this video is going to be a little bit longer than the videos I've been making recently. As many of you know, I've made my new microlearning video series with videos, mostly 5 minutes or less. And I now have the new Did You Know video series, which is going to fit the YouTube Shorts requirement of being a minute or less. I've got 2 or 3 of those already up and I'll be making a few more soon. Uh, look in the comments because I'll give you the links to both of these, um, playlists so that you can bookmark those and keep those available for whenever you got a few minutes and you want to add a new skill or two. In this one, I want to go a bit deeper though. Uh, I haven't done a deeper dive video in a little while, and this is a topic that actually came up from one of my recent client sessions. One of the people in session said, okay, Randy, you talk all about how you shouldn't be leaving emails in your inbox and how you should be triaging your emails, and if you can't deal with them now, they move into your task list or your calendar. And I'm going to show a little graphic about that here in just a second. But the really insightful question that this person asked at that time is, What happens then if your task list becomes your beast? It's not your inbox anymore. In essence, aren't you just passing the buck? And I thought that was a super insightful question. Now, it sort of opened up a little can of worms in the session. I said, hey, can we talk after the session? I got an idea for you to consider. This is that idea. It's a possible relief valve strategy. It's not one that I will guarantee will fix the problem. But it certainly could be something to add to your toolkit that might help. And I want to show specifically how you can set this up and utilize it if you are using Microsoft Outlook and/or Google Workspace, Gmail, Google Tasks as your primary day-to-day planning tools. So let's dive in and talk about this, uh, interesting topic of your task list being your beast, um, as we go into this. Now, Going into this, I, I, what I teach on email is a strategy where effectively you're triaging, um, your emails. When they come in, you open them, you make a decision what you need to do. If they're quick, try to handle them now. And if they're not quick, notice strong, strong effort to put it on your task list. But notice right here, I also say, or it could go on to your calendar. Now keep that or calendar thing in the back of your mind because it sort of could potentially be that relief valve. And then once you either get it done or on your task list or calendar, of course you file it or delete it. And if there's no place to file it, you make one, you put it there. See, it just sort of walks you through the decision tree. And of course, if you follow this perfectly, you should end up with no emails in your inbox. Hopefully at least once a day. I mean, obviously not a lot of people are going to get to that each and every day, but it's a good goal. One less thing driving you crazy— your inbox. But then of course your task list might become the pass-the-buck location for everything you're not getting done in your email, which is really not solving the problem. Might be helping a little, It's not solving the issue. But let's go one step further beyond the normal decision tree. I want to talk about this calendar option right here because, um, there might be a way that you could sort of take concepts of both project and task management and calendar management from a more strategic level and maybe merge them a little bit to allow you to make maybe get the best of both? Let's talk. All right, here's the signs that I believe your task list is a beast. Each and every day you're not even coming close. You've got too many tasks, not enough day. If, if that's happening every day, that means that the task list has become overwhelming and it's almost becoming a source of distraction each and every day. You see, you keep putting tasks off, the same tasks you keep Maybe re-dating them or removing them, and that task list just keeps getting longer and longer. You're not ever catching up. You know you're falling behind. By the way, look at this list and just replace the word tasks with email. That's how you know you got an email beast too. Uh, either of these will tell you that you've got a situation of overload and overwhelm happening in these locations. Now, what it might mean is that you're over-tasking. Now, here's what I mean. You're turning everything into a task, but you're not getting to tasks on that task list much of the time. You're probably getting some of your tasks done, but the task list just keeps building and building, and it, it starts to become its own beast, like we said. And I'm wondering if you're in this situation, if this sounds like you, Maybe it's time for a strategic reset. And I want to share with you one possible relief valve. Now, I'm going to make another video that goes beyond what we're going to talk about today, which talks about multiple relief valves when you're in an overtask, overwhelmed situation. Watch for that coming soon. But here is a very specific recommendation that I think you might be able to pull off. And here's the nuts and bolts. First, only give due dates to items on your task list that actually have hard deadlines and true urgency. What? Stop using due dates as much? Just hear me out. You can still make your other items into tasks in both Outlook and Google Tasks, and I'm going to show you this in just a minute. You can still make them into tasks. Don't give them a due date, but If you, if you want, you could still prioritize them. Now I'm going to share a couple ideas on this in a little bit, but then here's the critical piece: label them instead of due date them. And what that means is you're going to make labels on these tasks that then mean you don't need to necessarily due date them. You can still prioritize them, but by labeling them Then what you're going to do is use your calendar more strategically and block time for your key projects, activities, events. And when it's time to go into those projects, activities, events, you will open up the task list that is within that label. Let me show you what I mean. Let's pop out here. Let's go into— out Microsoft Outlook first. Here is my Today view task list. Now I'm going to put a link to, um, a video I did on this a couple years ago, which is one of my highest-rated videos. It's all about how to set up and get your today task list view working well for you with high to mid to low priority, very clear subject lines, and those labels via the categories tool. Now take a look at this. I have set up numerous labels. I also have a second video all about how to set up and utilize the Categories tool. I will link that one in here too. As you're seeing, this could become a pretty intensive little self-study exercise on your part, uh, taking advantage of all of these things I'm linking in this one. But these categories, I, I mentioned in that other video, they're effectively labels for your key things. I'm cutting myself off a little bit here, but these categories like, uh, Client Prospect, my Accounting Finance activities, Book and Workbook projects, Household That's my honey-do list. Marketing and PR, streaming programs, Timely Tips, my e-news, and my YouTube channel. So these are all my big buckets, okay? And as you can see, on any one of these tasks, I can actually go in and add categories. So like this one is also related to streaming programs, so I've added a second label to this one right here. Now here's the thing. If your task list is looking like this, that's a doable task list. What's that, about 8, 9 items? And I've already got a couple done today before filming this video. But if your task list is coming down here and even streaming off the page just for today, you're not going to get all that done, especially if you have meetings and other commitments. You're going to just stress yourself out, and your task list will actually become your albatross, your distraction, your squirrel. And the problem with that is then you're going to get overwhelmed and distracted, and you're going to start spinning wheels trying to figure out, well, what the heck should I be working on next? And just frankly getting stressed and depressed because you're falling behind. What good is that? Now, if you get it down to something like this though, that's a doable task list if you got a couple hours of open time today. That's exactly what I want to get to. And looking at this, following exactly what I said, let me show you something here. Uh, submit courses, which is a client prospect thing for one of the clients. Uh, I'm going to change the due date on this. Let me show you how easy this is— to none. And I think I'll also do this thing for Renee. I'm going to switch that one to none. And now I'll click off of it. Now I just made my task list even more actionable. I've got myself right down to the few things I really want or need to get done today. But wait, where'd those tasks go? You gave nuns— did another video, you can watch that in the comments too, about the other 3 views that I use in Outlook. One is the Next 7 Days view, one is the Completed view, a really useful view, but here's the one I want to focus on right here. It's called the Active view. Now the ActiveView Outlook users, take a look at this. If you come up here to the top and right-click the ActiveView and go down to View Settings, now look what I've done. Group by Categories, Labels, which we've already discussed, and then I sort by Due Date Descending. I'll show you why I did that. It's a bit weird what I'm doing here, but you'll understand in a moment. Priority descending also. If I've got it grouped by categories, sorted by due date and priority in this form, let me show you what that does. And I'm just going to take the Household Honey-Do list as an example. You'll see I have 21 items. If I click it open, now what I can see at the top are the items that have a due date. These are the ones that I have some urgency to. Including building my wife's new stand-up desk. She really wants me to get that one done. That's happening tonight. Um, but beyond that, I've got a few others that have specific due dates. Now the interesting thing here is that, um, when you look at this, right, paging down, I've got a whole series of other ones that have no due date. Now because they have no due date I'm not going to work on them unless I have blocked time on my calendar. Uh, let's go into my Google Calendar for household items. Now you'll see I've got outdoor lawn prep. I should also do household items and then hit save. All right, so with that I have now basically blocked time on my calendar to work on that specific task list. You see, do you see what I'm doing here? And this is a really interesting week for me. I don't have a lot of client work. I've got a couple client, uh, items here and meetings, but I'm not doing a lot of client presentations this week. Next week I've got a crazy week of client presentations. And I saw this as a golden window for me to work on exactly what I'm talking about here. So what I've done is I've gone in and I've blocked time on my calendar for very specific items. One is this new YouTube video. Number two, here's streaming programs, which is sort of related to my YouTube video. Here is getting my new e-newsletter ready to go out. Here is a time block for marketing and PR and website activities. Here is a time block for outdoor lawn prep activities around the house, and here is maybe a little time block for inside, uh, activities. And so I've made strategic time blocks on my calendar about all of these items, all of these key projects that I'm working on. I even have been blocking a little bit of time every day for writing on a new book project that I'm working on. And I've got them plotted out in the open blocks of time on my calendar. Now I will say this is a bit extreme because it's a pretty open week. So I'm trying to be very strategic with my time this week. But what happens is whenever I get to one of those time blocks, you know, like CRM, which stands for client, I would go to my client bucket in my task list and start working on the most important and/or urgent items within that specific client prospect task list, not my regular task list, my client prospect task list, my streaming programs task list, my marketing PR task list, website task list. And so as you can see, the structure of the Outlook Task Manager, uh, when we go back to it, allows me to see the tasks both in a today view, which is where I think you put your critical and urgent items that have defined and hard task deadlines, or your active items sorted by category, which means by label, which means by project, client, activity, event. And then what you'll do is you'll count on your ability to be blocking these blocks of time for those really important bigger picture but maybe not red-hot urgent items on your calendar. And then when you hit those times in your calendar, you go into the appropriate task list and start knocking some stuff out. Now what's interesting is I showed you how this works in the Outlook Task Manager, but now let me show you a little something. Take a look at this. Now here was my, uh, Google Calendar, which I showed you, and I've even done some color coding in here depending on the type of project or event. But let me show you something interesting about the Google task list. Notice I've selected Google Tasks so I can see it on the side. You can also do the same exact thing in your Gmail. And under here, this is my today list, which are the things I'd like to get done today. Once again, a reasonable focus task list. But notice what you can do inside of here. You can actually come in and create a new list. That easy. You just type in the name. These new lists would take the place of what you're doing in Outlook with your categories and labels. You would make lists for each and every major project, client, client activity event. And what would go in there? Well, of course you would have— look, there's my household list again— honeydew items that maybe don't have due dates. See, once again, no due dates. You could prioritize by maybe putting, you know, the word 'hi' or an exclamation point on the ones that you think are most important, right in the description line. But what you would do is you would not put in due dates. You would instead rely on that time on your calendar when it pops up to go into the specific list and work on that specific thing. You could do it either way. I mean, you know, a third way you could do it is you could just maybe make like these specific project lists of things to do. You can make specific to-do lists in a tool like OneNote or Google Keep. Also, you could have a different list for each of your major things. You wouldn't even have to use Outlook Tasks or Google Tasks, and then you could use your note app to do the same thing. And when the time comes up on your calendar, you pop into the note, you start knocking out the stuff that is going to be the best use of your time, reserving your formal daily task list for your most important stuff, urgent stuff. Make it shorter, make it tighter, make it more actionable. Now, uh, let's go back to this because, you know, really sort of the whole thought of this process, uh, is to allow you to be able to take more advantage of using your calendar and your time more strategically while not letting your task list become completely overwhelming. Now, here's the thing though. If you put all this into place and you're still not keeping up, then you got to ask yourself a bigger, more strategic question. Am I just trying to do too much? And remember, the factor of too much may not be a factor of not having enough hours in the day. Maybe it's a motivation thing and you just don't— You don't have enough energy to get through it all. And hey, that's, that's at least acknowledging the situation. Other times it might just be just patently impossible for you to try to do everything you're trying to do with the amount of time and energy that you have. So what I'm going to do is another video coming up, which talks about a higher level set of options and strategies next. Some ways to maybe be able to make up this gap, if there is this gap here,, and we'll identify your other relief valves. But from a bare minimum perspective, I think this opportunity to utilize both the task list function and your calendar in both Outlook and/or Google Workspace in a little bit more of a strategic manner, putting a little bit more of the, um, focus into your time and your calendar, and maybe reserving your task list for your most critical urgent items instead, maybe could give you an option to not be quite so stressed by the beast that is your task list. I think this is a really good second-level potential strategy for those of you that have moved beyond having your email being the beast and have now moved into that area where your projects and tasks have become your beast. Hey, and at least you moved, and at least you're fighting a new beast. Maybe this will help you with that. Like I said, my daily, weekly goal: I want to get a short actionable task list each and every day that is of a size that I feel like I can actually maybe get it done and it's somewhat motivating, not distracting. I want to, on a weekly basis, block time on my calendar, especially in open blocks, for my most important projects, goals, activities, events, both work and personal, and utilize my weekly planning process. I try to do this at least once a week. And I don't know if you notice this. Let's go back and take one quick little final peek here. Go back into my calendar. Notice that on Monday mornings, if I possibly can, I block some time to plan my week. Now, if my Monday is crazy, I'll usually do something like that sometime on Saturday or Sunday then instead, so that I don't just walk into a racehorse situation right at the start of the week. I want to have a little bit of a plan in place right from the beginning. And by doing that, that is how you can sort of get above the fray and not just dive right into all of the squirrels that are going to hit you each and every day when you're doing this stuff. I hope this gives you some ideas here on how to attack a slightly higher level problem that maybe some of you that have been following me for a while now, maybe have run into at this point. So with that, I'd like to say thank you for your time. Like I said, a little bit longer. Remember my links. I've got a bunch of links below this video with reference materials that allow you, including my new, uh, Did You Know YouTube Short series, my microlearning series. I've got that video on the Today task list, the other 3 views, and the Outlook task list. I got a video on how to utilize the Google Tasks down in here also. You know, look for all of that as a way to maybe take your next step regardless and depending on whatever it is you're using. If you'd like to learn more about me, go check out my website, which has been recently updated. Notice a slightly different URL. And, you know, if you want to get my productivity PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, smartphone/tablet usage, Google Workspace usage, How to reduce those crazy distractions. Send me an email, Randy@randaldean.com. Just put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll be happy to get that off to you. Thank you for your time, focus, and attention today.