Measure Your Task Management Skills:
Check Your Floor!
Picture your home. Like most houses, it has walls, doors, windows, a roof, floors and ceilings, and hopefully a good foundation.
I always tell people that being organized is the foundation for being more productive. Without being able to trust your systems like you trust your home’s foundation, your productivity can crumble.
Your foundation, or trusted systems, would include one place to find all your contacts, one calendar, an organized reference file system, an organized e-file system, etc. There would be no clutter and you would know where to find things when you need them. You would be on solid ground and not a shaky foundation.
But what about your to do list or task list? Should that be a trusted system? You bet.
So what part of the house is your task list?
I would say it’s the floor.
The floor in your home helps you get from here to there with ease… from room to room. You can navigate your house with a solid floor like you can navigate your work day with a good solid task list.
What if your floor wasn’t solid though? What if it had holes in it? Big, dangerous ones? It would be hard to get from the kitchen to the living room if you had to step around big holes.
Today, if you went from room to room, you wouldn’t have to look down to see where you were going. You would just walk. If your floor had holes, you would HAVE to look where you were so you could see the holes and avoid them. Your progress is much slower since you have to navigate around the holes.
An incomplete task list is like a floor with lots of holes. If your tasks are on pads of paper and post-it notes… plus some on the computer, some in e-mail and some in your head… plus you use the papers and files around you as reminders of what to do each day, then you’re walking a floor with lots of holes.
Then you HAVE to keep looking around your desk or your office to see what you want to do next. You’re checking the pads of paper… you’re checking what’s on your desk… you’re looking
at the post-it notes that adorn your computer monitor… these are holes! Your task list isn’t complete and it’s not a trusted system. It doesn’t hold everything that you need to do, including target dates for taking action.
Don’t let this happen to you! I want you to be able to get from here to there, from day to day, without having to look down or anywhere else but ONE task list. Repair your floor…. Get an electronic task list together so that it includes everything you need to do, have to do, want to do and dream of doing all in ONE place. Then you’ll be safe getting from here to there with no holes in your day.
