“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
If you’ve ever run more than a few miles, you’ll know why you need to pace yourself. Runners who sprint at the beginning of a race will be exhausted long before they cross the finish line. The same principle applies when it comes to working out. Keeping weekly or daily to-do lists is an incredibly effective solution to pacing your work.
Weekly/daily to-do lists
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The principle behind the weekly/daily to-do list method is simple:
At the end of the week, write a list of everything you want to accomplish.
Write a list of the parts of this weekly list you want to finish tomorrow.
Once the daily list is completed, you stop. Do not work on other projects or tasks. You have the rest of the day to relax. And when you’ve finished the weekly list, you’re done for the week. If you spend on Friday afternoon, you get back to work on Monday morning.
While this technique may seem obvious (and it is), using a TD system has some crucial advantages over the typical Getting Things Done method of keeping lists of upcoming actions or projects.
Why the weekly/daily task list system is excellent:
After using this method for several months, I have found that it outperforms other systems in a few key areas:
A WD system manages your energy. The problem is not running out of time but running out of power. You may have 24 hours in a day, but most of it is spent eating, sleeping and relaxing after a few hours of exhausting work. Any productivity system that doesn’t take this into account is flawed.
A weekly or daily system breaks work into manageable chunks. Instead of trying to finish everything every day, I accomplish my daily list. The same thing happens throughout the week. With a WD system, you get as much work done as possible while leaving yourself time to relax and enjoy selective unproductivity.
A system puts an end to procrastination.
Procrastination can occur when you see the mountain of work ahead of you and can’t visualize an easy end. You can turn elephantine projects into bite-sized tasks by dividing your to-do list into daily lists.
A system makes you proactive.
My system used a daily to-do list for a few years before I implemented this method. Unfortunately, this method caused me to lose sight of more important tasks that needed to be more urgent. Adding the eleventh task a day doesn’t sound very appealing when you already have ten on your to-do list.
But when you write the weekly list, your mood is different. With six days to complete everything (assuming you take a day off), it’s easier to jot down those important but not urgent tasks.
A system keeps you from burning out.
I previously wrote about how I accidentally overloaded my schedule last week. Using the weekly/daily system kept me from burning out or feeling stressed, even though I was dealing with two to three times the workload. By automatically dividing my work into weekly total and daily increments, I could focus on the next bite instead of the whole elephant.
How to use a weekly/daily task list?
The title of this section seems obvious. Write your weekly and daily lists, finish them, and start over. But after using this approach for a few months, there are some nuances to keep in mind.
Focus on the daily list
The purpose of the weekly list is to serve as a starting point for writing daily lists. Once you’ve broken down the piece you want to take care of tomorrow, the other tasks of the week shouldn’t concern you. You can pretend they don’t exist, as if the only functions in the world are tomorrow.
This approach is an incredible stress reliever. It’s easy to worry about how everything will end. But it’s easier to manage when “everything” becomes seven or eight tasks for tomorrow.
Don’t expand lists
If you finish your daily or weekly list ahead of schedule, you may be tempted to make it longer. Why not add a few more activities? You have the time.
This is a bad idea because it takes your focus off the daily list. As soon as you create the opportunity to expand it, your “everything” shifts from tasks you need to finish tomorrow to your endless to-do list. Stress and procrastination quickly follow.
There will be times when you need to make adjustments. Last-minute tasks will need to be added to your lists. But try to expand your lists only if you have time to spare.
