Are you biting off more than you can chew?

We’re all guilty of it. We add too many tasks to our task manager and assign them a random date so we won’t forget about them, only to find that our brain’s natural bias has assigned the same dates to all these tasks. We find ourselves with an overwhelming list of tasks to do.

It’s not the best strategy if you want to feel less stressed and overwhelmed.

Aside from this being a symptom of not trusting your system and not completing a regular weekly planning session. If you want to feel more in control of your day, you need to be more ruthless about what you add to your task manager and more objective about when you will do a task.

Yes, it is essential to develop the habit of adding tasks to your task manager—if you are not adding tasks, you will be relying on your brain to remember to do something, which is not the best way. However, when it comes to processing what you collected, that’s where you want to be ruthless about what gets into your system. The goal is to operate from a position of elimination and reduction and commit to doing less.

You should also look for underlying issues, such as not trusting your colleagues to respond to requests or do their work. For example, if you have a lot of “follow-up” tasks, the problem is not with your task manager; the problem is with you (or the people you work with), and you need to look at that and perhaps have a conversation about timely responses.

It would also help to look at how you write your tasks. If you write tasks such as “Jenny presentation”, you will hesitate when that task comes due because you do not immediately know what it means. Often, you won’t remember why you put the task in there in the first place, and either you will ignore the task or waste a lot of time attempting to remember why you put the task in there in the first place.

Use action verbs to make the task clear, such as “Ask Jenny if she has finished the presentation for next month’s product launch”. Other action verbs are call, contact, clean, write, design, continue, and start. These verbs will instantly help you know what needs to be done.

The goal is to have as few tasks on your daily list as possible. The fewer tasks there are, the more focused and in control you will be. Your task manager will become an aid rather than a source of stress, and when that happens, you will feel so much better, be more focused and get a lot more important things done.

If you would like help with time management and productivity, my website has several resources designed to give you the tools to master your time.