7-Day Productivity Plan - 3

7-Day Productivity Plan: Day Three

Estimated reading time: 5 mins, 15 secs

QUICK-WIN: Get everything out of your head. Stop trying to remember everything and instead, add all your ideas and the things you need to do to your task list. You'll be amazed at how liberating this can be. I've seen people's stress literally disappear as they start to organise their to-dos and create structure around their work.

“Your mind is not for holding ideas, it's for having ideas” – David Allen


 

Hi [urlparam param=”FirstName” default=”friend”/]!

Yesterday your job was to write a clear and actionable vision for the project you're working on. This vision is going to keep you on track and motivated.

Today we're going to plan out the specifics and dissect this vision into the things you actually need to do on a daily and weekly basis in order to reach your goal.

The problem with big goals

When I go out for a long run I often start with a sense of dread, knowing that I’m miles from the finish. When I focus on getting up the next hill, or getting past the next lamp post, or simply putting one foot in front of the other, this feeling melts away. Before I know it, I’m rounding the corner onto the final stretch and wonder where the time went

Having a goal is great and gives you a sense of direction, creates motivation and helps you to prioritise what to work on. Often we’re told to challenge ourselves and set the bar really high; this encourages us to set even bigger goals. This is great until you get hit by the feeling that your goals are unattainable and the whole process of working towards them now seems incredibly daunting. When this happens productivity goes out the window and the idea of quitting can appear more and more attractive.

The secret to overcoming this feeling is to take a different approach towards how you treat and tackle your goals. The trick is to schedule time to work on the smaller tasks that make up your goal. To do this, we must dissect and break down the goal into its individual components.

Planning your project

Use the following steps to plan your projects:

1) Choose your task management app

You may already have a tool or app that you like using for managing your tasks – if you do, that's awesome! It doesn't matter too much what you choose to use, but I recommend choosing something that has the ability to:

  • Organise tasks into different “projects”.
  • Allows you to group tasks from multiple projects into different categories using “tags” or “labels”.
  • Syncs with the cloud so you can access it from your phone, home and (or) work computer.

I'm a big fan of Asana because it's very simple and easy to use, but still very capable and provides me with all the tools I need for organising my workload. Other popular choices include Todoist and Omnifocus.

2) Set up your projects

You can now set up different projects to organise your tasks. This doesn't necessarily mean you should have one stand alone project for the goal you're currently focusing on. In Asana, I have multiple projects all related to my side-business. For example, I have projects like website, content calendar and products.

3) List everything you need to do (and go for quantity)

Now you can list all of the smaller tasks you need to complete as part of the projects and goal you're working towards. Go for quantity and list everything you think needs to be done. You should also go for depth and break up your tasks into sub-tasks to make sure everything is thoroughly planned out. This makes scheduling time for these smaller tasks much easier later on (more on this tomorrow).

Here are some of my tasks and sub-tasks:

  • Write “16 Productivity Tips for Part-Time Entrepreneurs”.
    • Write the first draft
    • Write final draft
    • Create featured image
    • Optimise headline
    • Send out email
    • Promote on social media
  • Update 7-Day Productivity Plan eBook
    • Write ebook using email content
    • Create book cover image in Photoshop
    • Update email opt-in page
    • Promote on relevant pages of the website

3) Assign due dates (DON'T skip this step)

A lot of people think adding tasks to a list is enough. They think that as long as they're written down, they'll get done. Wrong! If you simply add tasks to a list, there's no sense of urgency and no order between the tasks. How do you know what needs to be done first?

This step is crucial. When you add items to your task list, make sure to assign a due date so that you know when something is going to be completed by.

Due dates don't show you when something needs to be completed by, they show you when you're actually going to do the work.

When you put everything into an order like this, it becomes a lot more actionable. Instead of looking at a long list of things to do and trying to work out what to do first, you simply go through the tasks based on their urgency (due date).

4) Use tags or labels to group tasks by important “contexts”

Now you can categorize your tasks by “context”. A context is like a state or a mode that you're in. For example, you could have tags for things like low-energy, high-energy, 5-minutes, 60-minutes, home, work, email, commute, urgent and important.

The benefit of using these contexts is that you can view all “important” and “urgent” tasks in one place, regardless of what project they're in. Or if you have 15 minutes before your next appointment, you could view all of your “5-minute” tasks and see how many you can get through.

In the “My Tasks” area of Asana, I have a section called “Waiting” to group tasks where I'm waiting for someone to get back to me on something before I can progress. I also use a “Next Actions” section to group tasks that I plan to work on when I have a spare minute or two. These are usually quick and easy tasks. You could, of course, use tags or labels to achieve the same result.

Mistakes to avoid

Avoid the temptation to add tasks to a list without attaching any information to them. Doing this is what leads to “overwhelm” as you add everything to an already long list and it becomes more and more daunting. Taking the extra seconds to think about the due date and important tags is going to save you a huge amount of time later and helps you prioritise tasks.

These dates and tags provide you with ways of filtering your tasks. Instead of looking at a long list and trying to work out what to do, you can focus on the urgent tasks or the ones that suit your current context e.g. you're on the train and can tackle all of the “commute” tasks that are easy to complete on your phone during the time you have.

Action step: Organise your task list

Go through the process above to organise your tasks into relevant projects. Take some time to make sure you've listed everything that needs to be done and have a think about the contexts or modes that are important to you.

Tomorrow you're going to take all of these tasks and start to schedule the time you need to get everything done. Keep an eye out for my email as this is one of the most crucial steps!

Have a great day,
Paul

 


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