How To Manage Your Daily To-do List

Podcast 176 How overwhelming is your to-do list? Do you find yourself not wanting to look at the list of things you have to do each day? It seems you’re not the only one.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Email Mastery 2021 Course Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 176 Hello and welcome to episode 176 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. So, you have a system in place. Your areas of focus and routines are filtering into your daily list and your calendar is supporting you by managing your available time each day. That’s great. But now, you find your daily list looks horrendous. It’s huge and leaves you feeling uninspired each day. What can you do about it? Well, that’s what I will be answering this week. Now, before I get to the answer, just a quick heads up, if you don’t know already last week, saw the launch of my 2021 edition of my Email Mastery course. Now the course is in glorious HD, it’s updated for the way we are managing emails today and I’ve added a few new lessons on processing your emails—a feature requested from the previous version.  So, if you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, this course is a must for you. This course will take the stress out of managing your mail and bring calm and focus to an area of work and life we cannot ignore. Links to the course are in the show notes. Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: Hi Carl, I took your Time Sector course and really enjoyed it. I have set everything up but now I find I have so many tasks in my today view I just don’t want to go and look at it. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?  Hi Anna, thank you for your question. Now there are a couple of reasons why your daily list is looking overwhelming and fortunately, there are ways you can manage that.  However, the first thing we do need to look at is how you are writing your tasks. There are two schools of thought here. One says you should break down your tasks into small bite-sized chunks and the other says to do the opposite. Personally, I like a hybrid of the two.  Let me give you an example. Imagine you have had a headache for a few days and you feel it’s time to see a doctor. With the first school of thought, you would write the following tasks: Get telephone number of doctor Call doctor and make appointment In the second school of thought, you would just create a single task called make appointment to see the doctor.  Now, I know this is a very simple example, but it shows you what can quickly happen if you break down your tasks into smaller tasks. You end up with double the number of tasks.  Personally, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way. The best way is the way that works for you., But, if you want a list each day that is less overwhelming I would suggest you ere on the side of writing macro-tasks rather than micro-tasks.   For me, I prefer writing macro-tasks. My task list contains tasks such as write blog post, do expenses, clean the office, plan YouTube videos. I could break these down into write the first draft of blog post, clean the carpets in the office or prepare YouTube video plan, but I don’t need such detail. I see the task: write this weeks blog post and I know exactly what needs to happen next. When I go into the office, I can see immediately what needs cleaning, I don’t need to break it down into the different parts.  Now the other reason you ma