4 Productivity Hacks for Crushing Your To-Do List

Start by Creating Small Wins

When you set out to cross things off our to-do list, you are often trying to prevent or correct a pattern of procrastination in order to accomplish some kind of goal.

According to Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, the key to creating new habits is starting small and achieving small wins.

“Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes.  A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.  ‘Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,’ one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. ‘Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Similarly, Dave Ramsey is known for recommending a philosophy of small victories when counselling people on how to become debt-free. Ramsey suggest utilizing a debt-snowball, paying of debts in order of smallest to largest.

In recommending this approach Ramsey acknowledges that there are mathematical arguments against the debt-snowball because it doesn’t use interest rates as a criteria for prioritizing debt repayment.

To refute those arguments Ramsey draws attention to human component of paying off large sums of debt. As he sees it, becoming debt-free is not simple arithmetic, but rather accounting complicated by human emotions.

In his experience, the feelings of accomplishment that result from paying off small debts early – creates momentum. According to Ramsey, it is that momentum that motivates and propels people through to paying off larger, more challenging debts.

The same thing can happen when approaching items on your to-do list. A string of small victories can help you summon the energy to tackle more challenging tasks with ease.

 

Word of Caution

While a small-wins strategy can help you accomplish a lot and build momentum, it can also enable some to avoid the larger tasks altogether. If you find yourself continually pushing the same tasks to your next day’s to-do list, you’ve already fallen into this procrastination trap.

To avoid this pit-fall just remember that every job can be broken down into smaller tasks. Every large job can be comprises of many bite-size tasks that contribute to a chain of small victories.

 

Create Deadlines

Parkinson’s Law says that work will expand to fill the time available for its completion. You’ve probably experienced this to be true at one time or another.

By giving tasks on your to-do list self-imposed deadlines you are effectively turning each one in to a personal challenge.

With a day or time specified as your deadline for a task, determining success and failure in meeting your self-imposed test becomes very easy and that clarity will help energize you to meet the challenge.

As a way to be even more intentional, you may consider putting the Pomodoro Technique into practice.

The Pomodoro Technique is a method of time management that encourages you to work with the time you have, rather than against it.

The basic concept of the Pomodoro Technique is to segment your work into 25-minute blocks – or pomodoros- each pomodoro is separated by a five-minute break. After four pomodoros, you take a break of up to 20 minutes.

By breaking the items of your to-do list into blocks of activity that can be completed within 25 minutes, the Pomodoro Technique can help you work at a steady pace while allowing for frequent breaks that  help prevent burn-out.

 

Done is Better than Perfect

A common word of advice in the books of Chandler Bolt is that simply completing a task is often more important than if the task was done perfectly.

Paralysis by analysis is frequently the down fall of a perfectionist but it can also be caused by imposter syndrome.

If your to-do list is comprised of components to your latest passion project, your idea of perfection is probably wrong anyway. For this reason, spending exorbitant amounts of time working on any one thing can have increasingly negative effects on your productivity.

By allowing yourself to call a task complete instead of scrutinizing minor imperfections, you are likely to accomplish more in a day.

In turn, timely completion of tasks will afford you more frequent feedback, focusing your attention to improve upon things of greatest importance. Without frequent feedback your attention and efforts can be monopolized by imperfection in areas of little consequence.

 

Prune Something

In an article for Inc., Todd Henry suggests that you can unleash your best work by doing away with the non-essential.

Henry went on to say, “You have limited energy to devote to your work, so the most certain pathway to mediocrity is to try to do everything.”

If you are struggling with an overloaded to-do list, list your items in order of priority and start to make cuts.

For important tasks that can be delegated, assign or outsource them to someone else. That could be as simple as assigning the dog’s bath to one of your children instead of doing it yourself.

If you find items towards the bottom of your prioritized to-do list that serve as nothing more than a time-suck or distraction, do away with that task or commitment all together.