Give Future You the Best Gift: Supercharge Your To-Do List to Get More Done Faster

Which tasks have been on your to-do list for months that you have not completed yet? What is it costing you to have that incomplete task on your list? Do you know why it has not gotten done?

The key to getting stuff done is using your to-do list to set yourself up for success. Your to-do list is a gift to Future You. Treat Future You the way she deserves to be treated. How do you create a to-do list that actually helps you stop wasting time, get more done faster, and stop losing money?

Maximize your effective work time by using to-do lists and brain dumps for their correct purposes:

Most business owners have a mile-long list of future and current tasks, projects, and ideas that they call their “to-do list.” My colleague calls it her “list from hell.” It includes new programs to create, ideas for blog posts, and a handful of urgent tasks. Does this sound like you? You are not alone! Like my colleague, you probably have a brain dump and not a to-do list. This, my friends, is not a list designed to set Future You up for success.

Let’s have a tiny psychology lesson. Your brain is inefficient at decision-making. Sure, you can make split-second decisions constantly throughout the day, but all of those tiny decisions are secretly using brain power. Your brain is using energy for decision-making when you decide whether to go out to eat, which restaurant, what to order, and whether to ask for a refill. Regardless of the speed, every decision uses energy. That energy use will eventually exhaust you. Decision fatigue will make it hard to do creative work, and it will slow down your business.

Brain dumps are useful for capturing ideas so they don’t get lost or forgotten. They increase the efficiency of your brain by decreasing the number of ideas that you are holding onto at any given time. Getting those ideas, projects, tasks, and reminders into a list is the best way to keep your brain focused on the work that brings in income.

The problem arises when you use that brain dump as your to-do list. Every single time you read one of those entries, your brain is doing work to remember what the task was, process the steps involved, and then decide whether you should do it now or later. You are exhausting your brain with those constant, repeated decisions.

You can set yourself up for success by decreasing the processing and decision-making that your brain does when you look over your to-do list. Create an actual to-do list by transferring the tasks for the hour, day, or week onto another list. There should be no choices. You know which tasks are for today, and you can accomplish the next task that brings you closer to your goals. This leaves Future You’s brain available for the work you want to be doing.

Break large projects into actionable tasks:

Jenna had three tasks on her to-do list when she called me this week. Those three tasks had paralyzed her with stress, and she had no idea how she was going to get everything done. I started by asking her what the tasks were, because three tasks doesn’t sound like it should be too bad, right?

One of the tasks was to run a 3D print for a customer. She listed the aspects of that “task”: Her printer set-up was four hours away at the shop she was moving out of. She had updates to run on her computer and the printer. She needed to verify she had the parts. Here's the thing: this was a project, not a task.

Think back to the unfinished items on your to-do list. Is it actually a multi-step process that you wrote down on your list as one item? If so, you’ve also fallen into the project trap.

Large projects should not be on your to-do list as a single item. When they are, one of two things happens. Either, you’re making progress that you can’t check off or note anywhere, or your brain is so overwhelmed about where to even start, that you can’t make any progress at all. Neither scenario helps Future You complete the project.

Break your larger projects into smaller tasks that you can actually take action on. If you are trying to create a new program, what are the steps involved? How can you identify your daily progress? Your steps may include brainstorming topics, researching topics, watching through the content you already have, doing market research, and deciding on your ideal client. All of these tasks happen before you even start writing!

When you have a large project, write the project heading on a separate sheet of paper. Then, list all of the tasks that you know will be associated with it. The more detailed and granular you can get, the better. Once you know what you need to do, transfer those specific tasks to your to-do list each day. You’ll be able to see your progress and know exactly what the next step is. Future You can get the work done because you set her up for success!

Give Future You some information

You have probably heard in sales training that if you yell your message out the window of a moving car, your audience should still be able to understand it. The same concept applies to your to-do list. Write your list as though you’re asking someone else out the window of a car to complete the task.

For example, you cannot yell “phone call” out of a car window and have someone else know what to do. Should I schedule a call? Be on a call? With who? When?

Write your to-do task with a verb in it. Provide some information for yourself about who, what, when, where, and why. You do not need to write a whole paragraph, but you will save yourself some decision fatigue and time by giving Future You some reminders. It is the difference between the specificity of “call” and “schedule sales call with Jesse for next week.”

We love Future You. Future You is going to do a lot of work completing all these tasks! Let's set her up for success so that she can be most efficient!