4 Steps for Accomplishing that To-Do List

Poorly Drawn Lines by Reza Farazmand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Adapted from Leo Babauta’s excellent Zen to Done, (itself a remix of sorts of David Allen’s Getting Things Done), this guide has been extremely helpful for my ever-growing to-do list over the years. Whether you’re an instructional designer, faculty member, student, or administrator, I hope this list helps you in your day-to-day tasks!

Collect: Have an idea? Remember something that needs doing? Get it out of your brain!
This tool should be simple and something handy, like a small notebook or a trusted app. Look for something that is portable that you’ll usually have on hand and don’t mind keeping with you. You’ll also want something you’re comfortable with—you’re more likely to use it if you like using it. The simpler and faster you can get those ideas collected for later, the better! Also think about where other items collect on their own—email inboxes, phone messages, etc. How many inboxes do you have?

What do I use? A mix between a Moleskine notebook for analog capture and Todoist on either my laptop or phone for digital capture, plus my email inbox.

Process: What do you do with all those things you’ve collected and all your various inboxes? I schedule time (usually first thing in the morning as I’m getting started with my day and in the afternoon after lunch) and go through each item in each inbox and follow the ZTD suggested order for making decisions about each one as I process each individual inbox (no need to compile, since anything leftover will be added to a to-do list):

Do it (if it takes 2 minutes or less): quick email replies, simple and short tasks, etc.

Trash it: newsletters after reading, junk email, information I no longer need, etc.

Delegate it: tasks for assistants, tasks I need assistance with, etc.

File it away: information I need to hold onto, but don’t need at the current moment—bookmarks, files, etc.

Put it on my to-do list: the things I need to schedule time to do!
I usually allow for around 30 minutes for each process session so I have ample time to attend to everything, including those short tasks, without feeling rushed.

Plan: Now that your list is narrowed down to larger to-do list items, can you identify 1–3 “most important tasks” (MITs) for your current day? How long do you think each task will take? Can you prioritize your MITs for earlier in the day? The more experience I get with this step, the more accurately I can guesstimate how long certain tasks will take and create a daily schedule. On days when I already have a lot of meetings and other obligations, it can be tricky to get a lot done in the small pockets of time between events, so I try to have a prioritized list that I can chip away at as I have time. Anything that doesn’t get done that day is rescheduled for the next as an MIT.

Do: Arguably the most important part of this list, actually doing the tasks you’ve selected is next! Now that inboxes are sorted, this is the perfect time to turn on do-not-disturb, close distracting apps and windows (and all those notifications!), and focus on your selected task(s). If you do get distracted, remember to collect those thoughts/ideas for later so you can get back to the task at hand.

What do I use? I really like the Pomodoro technique for tasks I expect to take 2+ hours, mostly because it schedules in short breaks that I am prone to skip without it.

There is a lot more to both ZTD and GTD, but these four steps are a great start for taming an unruly to-do list. In the process, you might also find it possible to achieve “inbox zero” (at least during each process step) and reduce some digital clutter and stress in your day-to-day activities.