by Celes | | Email this post

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In my previous post Boost Your Productivity in 50 Ways, tip #13 is to create a to-do list. If you usually do things on a whimsical basis or as and when they come in, using a to-do list will boost up your productivity by a notch instantly.

The simplest to-do list is your standard, run-of-the-mill type which lists out all the A-Z items in no specific organized fashion. I call this the laundry list because it’s just a whole laundry list of items. This is also the list I’ve been using for good number of years. For the simplest intents and purposes, this list works fine, such as grocery shopping, getting things in place, running errands, etc.

However, if you are trying to get the most value out of your effort, you won’t get that with laundry lists. The problem with laundry list is the measure of productivity is tied to the length of your list. When using such a list, I often found myself working fervently to get it nicely trimmed down to a few or zero items. The shorter the list is, the more satisfied I felt at the end of the day.

After a while, every day felt like just a mechanical process to complete the things on the list. What’s worse, when I looked back in the day or even week, it felt I didn’t get much accomplished. I could be working the minute I wake up till the end of the day but not see concrete output.It was as if all the time just vaporized! Needless to say, it was bewildering and slightly disappointing.

After a few months of doing this on and off, I decided there had to be something fundamentally wrong in the way I was approaching my work. During my meditation retreat, I unloaded all my pending list of things to do and reviewed the trend of my working pattern for the past few months. What I found out that:

• Using the laundry list, I had subconsciously assigned the same level of importance to every task even though it may not be the case.
• In my quest to get the to-do list shortened as much as possible, I spent a lot of time on easier or smaller tasks, so I could quickly take them off. These include checking/replying email, clearing out my facebook requests, site administrative tasks and fiddling around on peripheral things inside my life handbook.
• Big-chunk, high-impact projects often get pushed to the next day, and the next, and the next, only get completed when they absolutely have to be done. For the projects that do not have a specific deadline like my upcoming ebook, it gets pushed off infinitely.

That’s when I realized the laundry to-do lists misses out on a very important measure – the impact of the tasks. The laundry list is not very effective. Because all tasks get piled on without prioritization of importance, they get cleared off almost randomly too. Bias is usually given to the smaller and easier to do tasks since they can be completed faster. But the problem is, these tasks usually aren’t the ones which give you impactful long term results. It’s the big-chunk tasks which give you long-term impact. Unfortunately, these often get deferred because they are too complicated or take more time than desired. If there is 1 big item which takes higher level thinking and 3~4 small items which can be finished in a shorter period, my natural inclination is to settle the smaller items first, for a sense of ‘closure’. Needless to say, this doesn’t result in real progress. It only gives a fake sense of satisfaction and productivity.

Gold tasks vs. Silver tasks vs. Bronze tasks

Rather than just listing all tasks as they are, I began to segment mine into three groups – Gold, Silver and Bronze tasks, based on their importance.

How do you know whether something is important or not? A good way is to ask this question:

What impact does doing this have in my life in 6 months, 1 year,  3 years, or even 5 years?

If something causes huge impact which lasts even in years to come, then it clearly is extremely important. If something causes a small level impact which bleeps off after a short-time frame, it’s not going to be too important.

What projects which, when undertaken and completed, will totally turn your life around? What are the things which will have significant impact even long after they are completed? These are your Gold tasks. Why do I use the term gold? Because it contains tasks which are the most valuable, just like gold. These would be the Quadrant 2 tasks, big rocks and the 20% tasks that make the 80% difference. You want to invest in gold tasks because they reap the most returns in time to come. In defining the gold tasks, your imagination is the limit.

For example, finishing and launching the book I’m writing at the moment (it’s on discovering and pursuing your passion) is a high priority, impactful task. Provided it is written with solid content and supported with good marketing, it will generate a new level awareness and further establish credibility of my work in personal development. It might be one of the levers which takes my work to the next level. The content has potential to help many who are get out of doing passionless works and give them the lift to do what they really love.

The second group, the Silver tasks, are tasks which have medium-level impact. Doing silver tasks on a regimented basis gives you incremental progress over time. The impact they can create are nowhere near the gold tasks since they do not give the huge ’shake-up’ or shift required to leapfrog you to your goals. Writing new articles is one of my silver tasks it builds up the content and keeps visitors coming. However, when I look at the big picture, the value between writing 2-3 more posts than usual is minimal compared to getting a gold task done.

The third group is the Bronze tasks. It consists of all the remaining activities not classified into Gold or Silver. These are the peripheral, less essential, day-to-day tasks with minimal impact. Typically the Quadrant 3 and 4 tasks. Most of the time they are just errand-based items or things you need to get done to get other stuff moving. They usually have an illusion of urgency tied to them, but in reality doing or not doing them does not make much or a big difference in the long run.

Tasks like checking my facebook, twitter, replying to messages are Bronze tasks. Some people may have the habit of checking their facebook and message every 10 minutes for messages, thinking that it’s an absolute need. But it really isn’t. If you have a message, it will be waiting there for you whether you check it 10 minutes, 1 hour or 1 day. There’s no need to keep checking unless it’s time sensitive.

When I don’t check my facebook, I may miss a few updates here and there from friends, but messages that are really important typically reach me anyway via other mediums. For example, when I got back from my Vipassana meditation retreat a few days ago, I didn’t miss anything much in the realm of social networking sites despite having been gone for almost 2 weeks! There was a big backlog of messages, new friend requests and activities, but beyond that there wasn’t much in the way of real developments which was missed.

Even though you can theoretically use a laundry list and pick off important tasks on the fly as you are working through it, I personally do not find this effective. Assessing a task’s long-term impact requires you to zoom out and look at the big picture. When I’m deep in my work, I’m in a more detailed-level state of mind rather than a big-picture mode. It gets a little disruptive trying to shift to a long-term focus and seek out a long-term, impactful task every time I finish what I’m doing. Based on experience, it was definitely much easier when to first sort out the tasks on importance, then proceed on with the day getting through the sorted priorities.

One important point to note is your definition of whether a particular task lies under gold, silver or bronze category is dependent on your own capacity and evaluation of your ability. At your current stage of life, you might consider a task as a gold task. However, a few months down the road, and it might get bumped down into a silver task. When I first started off blogging, writing new posts and promoting the site were gold tasks to me. Now that I’ve developed a certain level of proficiency in them and I have more capacity to do other more impactful work, these tasks have shifted down into silver tasks. Even the gold tasks I have on my list now, such as getting new speaking engagements, will get bumped into the silver tasks in the future as I become more equipped to take on even higher impact work.

Create Your To-do List

Try spending five quick minutes writing all the tasks you need or want to do for the upcoming week(s), or even month(s). You can put them in your notepad, using a post-it software like sticky notes or an online to-do list like Remember the Milk. I use sticky notes and it’s really convenient for me to crosscheck against my list every time I’m working at my computer.

Next, classify them into gold tasks, silver tasks and bronze tasks.

For example, here are some of the tasks I have on each list this week:

My Gold Tasks

High impact, long-term tasks

• Finish and launch book
• Revamp my coaching system and toolkit as I increase coaching quota and manage an increased diversity of cases
• Finalize office space arrangements for coaching (this is important as a permanent office space will expand my coaching capacity and streamline things)
• Discuss new projects with potential partners
• Networking; Foster relationships with related people in industry
• Design group coaching programs to start in future
• Start work on my 2nd book
• Secure new speaking engagements
• Other long-term projects

You can also further arrange within the list in order of importance so priorities become even clearer.

My Silver Tasks

Medium impact tasks

• Write new articles
• Work on upcoming speeches
• Continual skills development
• Marketing and promotion for blog
• Prepare for coaching sessions

My Bronze Tasks

Low value tasks, with minimal impact

• Make payment for business registration
• Make amendments to some blog posts
• Tweak site coding
• Send out invoices to clients
• Email various people on some things
• Return books to people
• Administrative activities, such as site maintenance, checking statistics
• Checking and replying to email/Facebook/Twitter/forums
• Watch shows, play games
• Other miscellaneous tasks

Invest in your Gold tasks

Have you been investing due effort in your Gold tasks? Or are you just pacing around with your Bronze tasks or even Silver tasks every day?

The secret behind making the biggest impact and progress is working on the Gold tasks. Not the Silver or Bronze ones. These keep things in check in your life and forward you to a certain extent, but that’s about it. I’m not saying to abandon your Silver or Bronze tasks – you still need to take time to get them done every now and then. But invest in your Gold tasks will give you the biggest payoff in the future.

If you don’t normally evaluate how you spend your free time, you will probably find the bulk of it spent on Bronze and Silver tasks. After segmenting my tasks in this fashion, it gave me instant clarity on what I should spend my time on. In the past, I spent way too much time (90% to even 100% of  my days!) on Silver and Bronze tasks rather than the Gold tasks (which received 0% to 10% of my attention). Suffice to say, this resulted in limited progress even after spending copious amount of effort.

You want to work smart and work hard, not work hard only. Anyone can work hard if they want to. The difference between whether you are working smart or not is the list you place your focus on. Investing the bulk of your time in the gold tasks is working smart.

Now, I make sure I spend at least 60% of my days on my gold tasks, a huge improvement from the previous 0~10%. When I don’t manage to hit the target, I will troubleshoot what went wrong so I can do things differently afterward.  The benefit of being self-employed is I get more leeway in my schedule and where my time goes, but it shouldn’t be difficult to apply this even if you are working for an employer.

What is a good timing split to allocate across the 3 sets of tasks? While there isn’t a hard and fast rule, I would recommend to spend 60-30-10 on the Gold-Silver-Bronze tasks respectively. If you had been spending 0-20-80 on your Gold-Silver-Bronze tasks up till this point, it might be too drastic a shift for you to make. If that’s the case, simply work on transiting to it. Start off with a 20-40-40, followed by 40-40-20, then slowly build it up to 60-30-10.

As you can see from my list, some of my gold tasks for the moment are writing my book and revamping my coaching system. Yesterday, I spent a good amount of time on developing my new coaching framework, something which I had been deferring for a period of time due to the amount of work involved.  While there was still room to further streamline how my day went yesterday, I’m quite happy with the progress made. This is creating an upward momentum which I can leverage on for days to come to generate even more results.

With your gold tasks, silver tasks and bronze tasks generated from the exercise above, designate a good amount of your time, at least 60%, on your gold tasks. Spend 30% on the silver ones. For remaining 10% on the bronze ones, clear off as many of the peripheral tasks as possible starting with the most urgent ones, then leave the ones you can’t clear to the next day. Don’t get to the stage of fixation with clearing off Bronze tasks because they will always keep coming in. They may seem urgent, but really they aren’t.

As long as you make sure the Silver and Bronze tasks don’t get out of hand and affect the workings of your daily life, it’ll be fine. Focus your efforts on the high-impact gold tasks and in time you will reap the fruits of your labor in spades in due time.

This is part of the Maximizing Productivity series. Be sure to check out the full series:

• Become the Master of Your Time
• Put First Things First
• Achieve More With Less In Life Using 80/20 Principle (3-part series)
• Get Your Big Rocks In First
• Gold, Silver and Bronze Tasks
• Law of Diminishing Returns
• Boost Your Productivity in 50 Ways

Filed in: Productivity | Posted on Jul 16 2009