Let me ask you a few questions.
When you get ready for work in the morning, do you put your pants on twice?
When you arrive at work, do you enter the building, walk out, and then enter again?
In the evening, do you cook and eat dinner multiple times?
No! Of course not.
After all, that would seem rather silly.
Plus, it’s a waste of time to do something MORE than once if once will do the trick, right?
Yet, that’s EXACTLY what most professionals do with email, tasks and information every day.
And that’s because doing something ONCE isn’t working.
It won’t “do the trick,” because professionals are trying to manage NEW email, NEW tasks and NEW information without a foundation in place and without and Steps #2 and #3 in the management process.
Let’s Start with the Foundation.
There are TWO things you must manage in your workday—information and tasks—and they ALL need a home of their own.
To manage REFERENCE information for future reference, you first need reliable locations for the various types of information you need to do your job. If you don’t have these, create them. If you have them, streamline them. Make them reliable and trustworthy. Then use them. All the time.
These are places like a Contact system (or a CRM), a digital Calendar (just ONE) and a reliable e-document library (in the hard drive or in the cloud) for the e-documents you create or the attachments you save from email.
You’ll also need a handy file system—or at least a drawer—for any physical papers and files you need to reference in the future. You might want a physical reading pile (but don’t let it get too big) for newspapers, magazines or printed articles. And you’ll want a location on your desk for items you may want to give away, mail out or delegate, though an actual “outbox” is NOT required. Enjoy the open space once that stuff is gone.
And finally, you’ll need a digital task list for all the tasks you’re responsible for.
Each system you have will give you specific places for the various types of REFERENCE information you’ll need for your job, and there should be only ONE place to manage tasks. Yes, there should be only ONE system for task management in order to do the MOST efficient and effective planning and prioritizing of tasks.
Let’s Talk about Tasks.
Many professionals write to-do lists on various forms of paper: legal pads, notebooks, steno pads, post-it notes… you get the idea. But creating multiple to-do lists is NOT the answer. Whether you try to group tasks by type or context or where the task will be done, none of that will help you.
Managing tasks from their sources is not the answer either. Tasks come from more than ten different sources in your day—email, phone calls, meetings, the papers and files on your desk, hallway conversations, social media, texting, instant messaging and more.
And when a to-do list is created on paper, that becomes yet another source. So if you have multiple lists for various TYPES of tasks, you’re making it harder on yourself to manage those tasks.
The ONLY effective driver for accomplishing tasks is determining WHEN to take action.
This is when you’ll do a task or when you want to see it again to when you want to consider an idea or an opportunity. This is the ONLY thing that will help you. And it’s all you need to make smart decisions about HOW to spend your time—both today and in the future.
Think about it. You wouldn’t want to look in 6, 8 or 10 different places to decide what you want to do TODAY, would you?
When tasks are all spread out—whether still at their source or on multiple to-do lists—it’s impossible to efficiently and effectively plan and prioritize, because you aren’t able to remember all of them and compare them. Plus, it would be very difficult to decide what would fit into your available time since some are likely stated as projects or larger multi-step tasks.
What to Do with Tasks
For the MOST efficient and effective planning, prioritizing and accomplishment of tasks, they must be centralized into one, digital system or list.
The best place to use is the one offered in your email system so you can transfer information quickly and easily from one module to another. Trying to use a little app on your phone won’t cut it. And paper is no good either, because a paper to-do list cannot possibly hold every task from all sources. You also cannot efficiently or effectively plan and reprioritize accurately on paper.
To get started, set up a centralized, digital task list of TASKS, not projects. Research shows that meaningful progress and achievement result from taking teeny, tiny action steps.
Task management drives progress, not project management.
Also, use the Due Date field for targeted dates of ACTION. Think of it as a DO date, not a DUE date. Break down projects and larger, multi-step tasks into smaller action steps—a first step to get it going or a next step to keep something moving forward.
Every time you take an action step or do a task, decide if/when it needs a next step and if it does, change the “do” date to the future date for taking that next action step. If it doesn’t need any further action or follow-up, delete it.
For ideas and tasks you want to consider much later, choose a target date for seeing it in a future month and let it fall farther down the list. Whether or not you actually DO it at that time is irrelevant. You are choosing a date when you simply want to SEE it and CONSIDER it. Meanwhile, it’s not missed, lost or forgotten, and you still have it in the ONE and ONLY system or list you will ever need for managing tasks.
And Finally… Email.
You know the drill. You open an email, you read it and you think, “I can’t deal with this right now,” “I need more time for this,” or “my brain can’t handle this right now,” and then… “I’ll come back to this LATER.”
As a result, emails accumulate and scroll off the screen—and along with them the many tasks, follow-ups, information, questions, and opportunities that were in those emails. And in order to find anything again, later on, you try to flag emails or mark them as ‘unread’ so they appear bold in the Inbox.
But these tactics are not serving you. You still must spend (waste) time scrolling through your Inbox or running a system Search to find them, or worse, you have to sift through emails you PRINTED and put on your desk. Yikes!
Sadly, all of these maneuvers leave you re-reading emails you’ve already seen… but couldn’t do anything with.
What to Do with Email
The time and brain energy wasted re-reading emails again and again is HUGE. You’ve GOT to get them OUT of the Inbox as soon as you read them THE FIRST TIME.
Remember the Foundation? That was Step 1.
If you took that step and you have reliable places for all of the information you need to reference later and you have a reliable, centralized task list, you will be able to get email OUT of the Inbox every time you read a new one.
Step 2 is to make a decision. Give yourself enough time to fully read an email—for the FIRST time—to understand it and then decide what needs to happen next.
Step 3 is to move the email OUT of the Inbox. Move it, file it, save it. It doesn’t matter which one you do, but you need to get it OUT.
And your goal for each and every email is NOT to just “touch it once,” but to move it forward each time you see it, if you see “it” more than once after you’ve moved it out of the Inbox for action.
Now, for reference items, you may only touch, move or save things ONCE, whether digitally or physically, and move it directly into its final destination where it will be stored forever. Awesome. That’s a one-and-done.
But tasks are different. When you add a task to your digital task list, you will see it more than once.
The first time you see it is when you’re simply adding it to the task list and you decide when you take action in the future. If that’s not today, you’ll see it again on the day it’s targeted for action. When you see it on THAT day, you’ll take an action step and then plan a NEXT action step on another day, if necessary—and it usually is—and then you’ll see it again the NEXT time, and so on and so forth.
Every time you see that task, you’re taking small action steps to move it forward little by little on different days. So, you’ll see it more than once. However, you will never have to see it at ‘Square One’ ever again, because every time you address the task, you’re taking NEW action steps and making NEW PROGRESS.
The final alternative for email is to archive or delete the email if it doesn’t contain anything useful to you, whether now or in the future. You want to take that step as soon as possible to get the email OUT of the Inbox. You definitely don’t need to see those emails twice.
Stop Revisiting, Re-Reading, and Reviewing the Same Things Over and Over
As stated in the beginning, if you don’t put your pants on twice in the morning or cook dinner twice every night, then stop re-reading emails again and again or reviewing to-dos in various places again and again. This is not the way to manage, plan, prioritize and accomplish things to do.
All of that is a waste of your precious time that can be better spent making PROGRESS, not revisiting, re-reading and reviewing the same emails, tasks and information as if you’re stuck in the movie “Groundhog Day.” It’s repetition for no reason.
It’s time to break free from repetitive behaviors that keep you stuck in a rut and instead, create MOVEMENT for your tasks, email and information, and make more meaningful, powerful PROGRESS every day.
