We all know what it’s like to have our to-do lists pile up with obligations and how overwhelming that feeling can be. This holds true for both our personal and professional lives, and the advice in this post can be applied to either, although we’re really focused on the workplace.
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Looking at Low-Hanging Fruit
Here, we’re going to recommend a simple strategy that can help make a big difference in your mental approach to tackling your to-do list: add in some low-hanging fruit. In other words, include some items that need to get done but that are relatively simple and not time-intensive.
While this will have the initial effect of making your list longer superficially, it doesn’t mean creating more work, simply documenting what you already need to do. Another way to look at this would be to create a “done” list.
A Quick Example
Here’s a quick example. Imagine an employee who needs to create a first draft of a presentation, discuss a change order with a customer, and draft and route an internal proposal for a new initiative, all by the end of the day. And that’s in addition to her existing workload.
That to-do list would look something like this:
To-Do Today
□ Presentation first draft
□ Call ABC Corp regarding change order
□ Draft internal proposal
□ Route internal proposal
Any one of these items could potentially take an hour or more, and it can be frustrating to keep looking down at a to-do list that shows no progress.
Consider if this employee were to then add in some low-hanging fruit that she needs to complete anyway:
To-Do Today
□ Presentation first draft
□ Submit HSA enrollment form to HR
□ Call ABC Corp regarding change order
□ Send daily report to manager
□ Draft internal proposal
□ Route internal proposal
□ Reply to e-mail from marketing team
□ Ask Bill for recap of last week’s conference
The list obviously got longer, but after knocking off some of the low-hanging fruit, it will look more like this:
To-Do Today
□ Presentation first draft
□ Submit HSA enrollment form to HR
□ Call ABC Corp regarding change order
□ Send daily report to manager
□ Draft internal proposal
□ Route internal proposal
□ Reply to e-mail from marketing team
□ Ask Bill for recap of last week’s conference
Psychologically, it can make a big difference simply seeing some progress tackling a to-do list as opposed to looking down at the same unchanging list of big items throughout the day. In a follow-up post, we’ll talk in more detail about the benefits of using this approach.