Deciding how to spend your time is among life’s hardest choices. Especially in America we’re surrounded by so many options it is sometimes hard to figure out exactly what to do.
After figuring out what you want to do with your life, you may need some help getting everything you want done.
Over the past few years I’ve heard this technique from at least two or three time management gurus (I think the first was Brian Tracy), and it’s served me very well.
There are 4 simple steps
1. The night before you want to get things done, spend 5-10 minutes before bed writing a list of everything you want to do the next day. This way you don’t have to think about what you’re going to do the next day, it will all be written out.
2. Go through the list and find the things that absolutely have to be done tomorrow and the things that if you do tomorrow will have a large pay off. Mark them with an A. These are the tasks you have to do.
3. Next go and find the things that will have moderate benefit over the long term and the things that will need done soon but not quite yet. Mark those with a B. These are tasks you want to do, either for long term work or to prevent an emergency later.
4. Last go through the list and mark a C to everything else. These are things you can do if everything else gets done.
That’s it. Using this technique will provide you an easy way of figuring out what your priorities are so you can work on the most important things first, and leave the unimportant things for later.
An important note: Step 0 is knowing what you want and what is important to you. When you know what you want in the long, medium, and short term you can better use this technique. For more information on that, check out www.lifeoptimizer.org/2008/05/14/how-to-focus-five-levels-of- mental-focus-you-might-not-aware-of/
Additional ideas:
-Keep the definition of A, B, and C loose. If you want them to mean something different then by all means change them. The value in the technique is gained from simplicity, not what each letter stands for. Just be consistent and it will work out well.
-Create a spreadsheet with two columns, one for the letter, and one for the task. That way once you’re done assigning letters, you can have your list sorted by importance.
-Consider adding time requirements to your goals. For instance, I wanted to be in my office working by 9am this morning, and it is listed as such on my to-do list.
