6 principles to unlock more Effective Task Management — E|F Shorts

Throughout all of our work and all of our life, keeping track of what we need to do and when we need to do it is an increasingly essential part of every day life. Here are the basic principles of how to do this well:

1. Write Everything down

Too many of us rely on our brains to remember things. So our spouse will asks us to pick something up today as we walk out the door and we hope we will remember when we are in town. Or before meeting someone we scribble a few thoughts down on a random piece of paper and hope that covers everything. Our brains are not designed to be faultless repositories of information. Don’t rely on them to be — write it down.

2. Write your tasks clearly — for you future self

Call Dave. We write down an important task for tomorrow. Call Dave. Tomorrow comes and we can think of 5 people called Dave and we have no idea what it is we need to call Dave about and so no idea which Dave to call. Write your tasks clearly and assume the person reading it is pretty clueless.

3. Only give a task a date if you actually plan to do it then

Too often we give tasks a due date in our task manager just to keep the task on our radar. We have no intention of doing the task on Wednesday, but we still set it due on Wednesday so on Wednesday we can decide when to do it, or next be…