My wife has issues with to-do lists. She’ll sit and write down 40 things she wants to get done in a day.
• Make grocery list
• Go to the grocery store
• Clean bedroom
• Complete powerpoint slides for a one-hour presentation
• Discuss presentation with co-presenter
• Attend thirty-minute meeting on the other side of town
• Weed the flower beds
• Do four loads of laundry
• 45-minute work call
• Wash and vacuum both cars
• Bring the car to get the oil changed and inspected
• Look for new rug for the living room
Can you see the very obvious problem with this to-do list?
That ’s more than a week work worth of things to get done.
That kind of list leads to one thing. Disappointment and sadness (ok that’s two things, but you get the point.
This Aint’ gonna work. If your lists look like this, I heard a great place to start the other day.
It’s called the reverse to-do list. I can’t remember where I heard it and when I went to look it up it seems like lot’s of people have been talking about. And rightly so.
Here’s what you do.
Instead of leading with the to-do list. Finish with it.
Right down everything, you do in a day. Do it backward. Record what you do.
Doing it this way will show you what you can accomplish in a day so you can make slightly more realistic plans in the future and it will show you were just maybe you could have done a little better.
Maybe in retrospect, the three separate trips to the grocery store didn’t make a lot of sense.
This may keep you from running around in circles and feeling like you didn’t check enough things off your list.
Test it out for a week and see if it helps.
But one important key. On that list at the end of the day, somewhere it should say, “spent 15 minutes reviewing The Final Step.”
BrianThe reverse to do list