To Do or Not To Do?

Do you find yourself in the position when you need to decide about do you must to do something or not right now? Are you a highly productive person?

This is probably one of the most heavy decisions that you need to make in your working day.

You know that there are too many things that you need to do in the particular day, but things continue to come around you, and you need to make that decision, you need to organize you.

Sometimes you have a great plan, or to-do list for today, and you receive the call from your partner who tells you that there is great opportunity for the business. You already have a to-do list that arranges your whole day. What you will do? Leave everything and jump into the opportunity that your partner told you?

Why This Happening to Me?

One simple answer to this question is that you are the person that allows to happen something like this. If you didn’t receive that call at the moment when you work on something you will not have such a dilemma.

On the other hand, if receiving calls from your partner is something with the biggest priority on your activities than you don’t have the dilemma, you need simply to leave everything and go do it what your partner told you.

But, what about if the call is from other persons? What about if you receive email messages? What about if you receive Facebook message?

That’s all possible because you don’t have a system to eliminate all possible distractions when you work on your to-do list where you have the important stuff to be done today.

Again, there is another side of the funnel. If you leave everything and jump into the new priority, probably you don’t have high-priority tasks on your to-do list.

In each of this cases you need changes in your system, you need improvements.

Do You Really Need to Leave Everything?

The first question that logically needs to come to your mind is: do you need to leave everything on which you work in the moment? Once something has happened, you have to do something. You need to decide to do or not to do.

The solution to the problem is to have the ability for quick prioritization of what’s next thing that we need to do. With the prioritization system, you can quickly decide that’s the best for you.

If the call from your partner is really high priority and with more priority from everything else on your to-do list than you can simply decide to leave everything and jump into the new direction of doing things now.

Sometimes this can be very messy for the rest of your working day, but again, you are the person that has allowed this to happen.

How to Escape the Dilemma?

If we decide to leave our plans for today and start doing something new that comes to our mind today without planning it, will create really chaos in our work. The tasks scheduled for today will be postponed, everything else will late for accomplishments. We will need to stay more on work if we want to finish what was planned for today.

Simple solution is to escape such a situation. But, the question is how?

Here are some ideas how you can improve yourself and escape the dilemma for to do or not to do.

Your to-do list needs to have clear difference between high priority and low priority tasks for today. If you know what’s high priority for you and start working on that tasks first you will know that everything else doesn’t need an attention from you.
When you work on high-priority tasks eliminate every possible distraction that can happen. Because you already know that everything else doesn’t need your attention when you work on your high-priority tasks you can simply eliminate everything that can take your attention from your current work. That means working without phones, without email, without social media, without possibilities for someone to enter your door…
When you finish with high-priority tasks then you can check all previously excluded distractions. It’s never late to jump in another high-priority task, but only when you finish each priority scheduled for today. The low-priority tasks can be done tomorrow.