Lets do an experiment.
Take a pen and a piece of paper. It’s OK, I’m waiting.
Now, write down everything you have to do today at work. Need to write a blog post? Write it down. Need to analyse the traffic data to a website? Write it down. Need to design a new flyer for your client? Writ… well, you get the picture.
Now, estimate how long it will take you do each task. Don’t try to fit them into your eight, or ten hour day. Write down how long these tasks will REALLY take you.
Have you reached 15 hours yet?
If you have, then don’t fret – you are in the majority. Most people bite off more than they can chew, and commit, even if it’s just to themselves, to too many tasks. When you don’t manage to complete all the tasks you set of to in the morning, then you feel like you’ve failed – even if you’ve completed many other tasks.
Now for the good news – there’s a simple fix. Note that I didn’t say easy – I said ‘simple’.
First of all, you need to get your tasks in order. Start off by going back to the list you wrote down at the beginning of the post, and add the tasks you need to do tomorrow, yesterday, and for the rest of the week. Now order them by priority – at the top put tasks that are really important, and at the bottom tasks that nothing will happen if they aren’t done by next week.
Now, write down by each task how long it’ll take you to do it. Again, no wishful thinking here – you might WANT to design a new website in 30 minutes, but you know it’s a three hour job. Of course your initial estimates might be off by a bit, but the more you do this, the better your guesstimates will become.
Once you have your tasks prioritized and you know how long they will take, you can decide how your day will look. You can take one extra task each day over your time limit, but no more than that!
You can do this task list every morning before you start working, or (like me) late at night before you go to bed.
And when you start working the next day, you’ll be amazed at how much more you’ll accomplish, and how much better you feel!