“The to-do list is nothing but a set of goals – not the big goals of live but the small day-to-day ones that we have to get through on our way to achieving our vision,” writes Subroto Bagchi in The Professional: Defining the New Standard of Excellence at Work. “The humble to-do list is the beginning of purpose and prioritization.
To-do lists are the staple of many project managers’ Friday afternoons. It’s the last thing I review before leaving the office. To-do lists are a simple tool, sometimes overlooked in the project management arsenal of available products, methods and templates. But spending the time to produce a clear to-do list at the end of a working week can prepare you properly for the week to come and help you spend less time over the weekend wondering what you will be doing when you arrive at the office on Monday morning.
Getting It All Down
Preparing a to-do list helps clear the mind and focus on what has to be achieved. The concept is simple – write down everything you need to do and then cross it off when you’ve completed it. The difficulty comes when the list goes on to multiple pages and starts becoming an unmanageable tangle of tasks.
One tip I have picked up over many years of writing to-do lists is that you need different levels of list. You may have a list of high level goals to achieve for the year, such as renewing your project management credentials. This will break down into a number of sub-tasks, just like a project plan. Your day-to-day to-do list may include all of these summarized at one level. This stops long to-do lists becoming unmanageable: you can always break out the action into sub-tasks later. After all, that’s what we do on projects all the time.
I keep my to-do list in the back of my working notebook. Having not yet gone completely paper-free, my notebook comes with me to project meetings and is my jotter for planning presentations, capturing meeting minutes and doodling when I need inspiration. If I kept a to-do list in the midst of all that, I would never find it, and never manage to single out the actions. Instead, I write my to-do list at the back of my notebook, on the last pages. I transfer actions captured during discussions (marked in the margin with the letter A in a circle so I can spot them easily) to the list if I can’t complete them immediately.
Prioritizing the tasks is straightforward – I just draw a star besides the actions that I need to focus on. You can also group tasks so that you can spend time working on things that are similar, such as reporting at the end of the month.
When a page has too many actions on it that are struck through, showing that they have been completed, I tear out the page and rewrite the list.
Electronic Organization
Paper works for me. I know people who keep their to-do list in their electronic device, either using a bespoke application or just by creating a list in a note-taking app. Some enterprise project management tools, including a range of software-as-a-service type tools, have to-do functionality built in. As well as tracking project tasks, software can keep track your other tasks too. Typically there are a number of ways to categorize or prioritize tasks, such as with colors, which gives you more granularity than just annotating tasks with a drawing of a star. You can set completion dates and the software will email you when a task is approaching its deadline. Paper can’t do that.
Bagchi writes about keeping all his notebooks with all his to-do lists, personal and professional, lined up in his office. Paper has that advantage (unless you tear out and throw away your lists, like me), but many software products do as well, with better functionality in terms of capturing the date tasks were completed and any accompanying notes. If you create a to-do list in a word processing or spreadsheet package, on your desk computer or personal device, you’ll end up simply deleting the line and you’ll lose the history. For personal tasks that might not be a concern, but on projects you may want to keep a record of the fact you have completed something.
Our consultants at Ten Six spend a lot of time working with project professionals and other clients, and we’ve seen a range of ways of organizing tasks, in fact as many ways as there are people. The important thing is to find a system that works for you and to stick to it. Don’t worry if no one else understands the squiggles in your notebook or the categorization system you have set up on your iPad for actions. To-do lists are hardly rocket science, and if it works for you, it works.