One way that we can know that our productivity is increased is when we start finishing everything that we put on our to-do lists.
On the other side, to-do lists serve us as a tool that improves our productivity because they ensure our better focus and right tasks with the right order that we need to finish.
In practice, you can find yourself in a position when you can’t complete everything on your to-do lists. It’s a very frustrating situation, especially when you know that tomorrow you have other tasks that need to be done. In such a way, after some period of time to-do lists can become very massive lists of tasks, and probably you will start to ignore some of your tasks or even worse to ignore the whole to-do list.
How you can complete everything that you have on your to-do list? This is not a simple task, and too many persons fail into the trap where they never complete all that is planned.
#1 Are you committed enough?
If you are committed that, something must be done it is more likely that you will start doing something to complete that item on your list.
Otherwise, without commitment, your brain will easily our ignore some of the tasks with a simple explanation that it will be completed tomorrow. And so on, day after day you will schedule and reschedule until you realize that you cannot complete more than half of your tasks. That’s not productive thinking.
Because of that, as a first thing in your efforts to complete everything on your to-do list is to look at all of tasks on the list, and ask yourself are you committed enough for each of them.
#2 Do you know the priority?
As a human person you will have too many things, too many tasks, too many ideas that need to be implemented… However, you have limited time. You can’t do everything.
On the other side there will be always something more important than other activities in your to-do list.
Prioritization will provide you to start with the most important tasks and activities.
#3 How much time you have?
The time that you have is limited on 24 hours daily. That 24 hours need to include sleeping, leisure, time with family, watching TV…
When you know how much time you have to implement the daily activities, you can divide that activities according to the time which will enable completion of them.
For example, if you know you have only 6 hours for your to-do list you will design your to-do list with the tasks that will need only 6 hours for completion.
#4 Can you delegate something?
It is interesting how human persons want to be able to hold a monopoly on their own tasks. If you have someone who can do it something for you, why don’t delegate that tasks?
If some of your activities are with less priority for you, then you can simply delegate them.
#5 Are your lists optimized according to your capacity?
As another opportunity to complete everything on your to-do list is to maintain highly optimized list according to yourself.
Highly optimized lists are lists that will be made according to the owner of the list, or more precisely according to capacity and capabilities of the owners.
Even you want to complete the 100 tasks in one day, your time, your capacity and your capabilities will not allow you to succeed in that. You can complete probably only 15 of them.
[...] you can see, with the help of this matrix, you can simply prioritize your tasks on your to – do list. This will give you tasks marked as 1 – something you need to do immediately, tasks marked [...]