Everyone uses To-Do Lists, but you either have too many tasks and feel overwhelmed or too few tasks which leave you confused and thinking up more tasks you can add to your list.

Everyone uses To-Do Lists, but many don’t know how to fully utilize them to boost your productivity.

Before you move towards boosting your productivity, here’s a small thread to help you understand what Productivity exactly is.

Read a Twitter thread about what Productivity is and why you should be productive here: Twitter Thread

The Framework

Before we start anything, it’s always helpful to have a framework in place. It guides you through your project as well as makes decisions easier with a predefined set of rules.

In our framework for a To-Do List, we’ll consider the following things (and there’s a bonus!):

1. Ideal Number of Tasks
2. Sorting Methods
3. Time Management
4. Tools

Ideal Number of Tasks

There’s no right answer for this, there’s no magical number that is perfect for your To-Do List, instead, you have to adjust it based on your lifestyle to optimize your productivity.

Here’s a baseline to help you get started:
3 - P1 Priority Tasks
3 - P2 Priority Tasks
5 - P3 Priority Tasks

Sorting Methods

Many people sort their tasks based on importance, starting with the most important to the least important. Although it’s not wrong, there are better ways to accomplish your tasks.

There are different kinds of tasks

• Some tasks take a lot of focus, thinking, problem-solving or decision-making capabilities like debugging in programming, preparing a concept for a design project, writing an article or making a very important decision for your startup.
• Others are more repetitive which don’t really need a lot of your attention like replying to emails, connecting on social media, etc.
• There are also tasks that are personal and don’t exactly fit into your professional life like doing chores, reading and watching educational/informative videos that you love to watch.

The kind of tasks differs for everyone, try to categorize your tasks. However, there’s one thing that must be common throughout all your tasks…

Every task must contribute towards three things, Your Goal, Personal Development, or Family. If it doesn’t do that, you probably don’t need to do that task.

Yes, doing chores or things like buying groceries, etc. count towards Personal Development and Family.

Everyone has a specific time period in a day when they feel most productive or focused. Some can focus early morning while their mind is fresh while others stay up late which makes them more focused because of the silence in their surrounding. Identifying that time period can have a significant impact on your efficiency, and in turn, your productivity.

Let’s get to actually sorting our tasks. We’ll sort our tasks based on a few characteristics.

1. Productive Time
2. Priority

Productive Time

You can divide your day into different time periods, for example, divide it into 4 sections:

• Morning
• Afternoon
• Evening
• Night

Priority

We can divide the priorities into three sections ranging from critical tasks to not so important tasks:
P1 - Critical tasks that must be done today
P2 - Important tasks with a further due date
P3 - Tasks that can be put off by a few days

Time Management

Managing your time is just as important as planning your tasks, which helps you optimize your time and boost your productivity. There are many methods to help you utilize your time efficiently, one of the most widely used methods is the Pomodoro Technique. Here’s a small Twitter Thread exploring the Pomodoro Technique.

Read a Twitter thread I wrote about using the Pomodoro method effectively here: Twitter Thread

Tools

There are many platforms and apps you can use to manage your tasks. Two of my favourite platforms to manage my tasks are Todoist and Notion.

Todoist is a full-fledged Task Management platform that provides an out of the box experience. It is available on every platform and provides many features like priority sorting and project management.

Notion, on the other hand, is a Do It Yourself platform. You have to build it yourself or use a template shared by others but it provides more flexibility to adapt the tool to your use case.

Footnote

👋🏻 Hi! I’m Satwik.

Thank you for reading this article. If you like this article, I’d appreciate a like, it’s free and motivates me to publish more content. You can also follow me on Twitter to get a bit-sized content about Productivity, Design and Development.