Finally Time to Stop the To-Do Lists

When I was in school, I was pretty disorganized and everyone who tried to "help" always suggested making to-do lists. I couldn't deal with them and never got fully through an entire one. They just weren't for me. Well, as the Harvard Business Review recently wrote, they don't rely work for anyone. Instead the blog post suggests a different route:

The alternative to the feckless to-do list is what I call "living in your calendar." That means taking your tasks off the to-do list, estimating how much time each of them will consume, and transferring them to your calendar. (Don't forget to leave time to process your email. And leave some empty space — one to two hours — each day to deal with the inevitable crises that will crop up.) In essence, you're making a production plan for your work.

As the blog post goes on to say, it's an eye-opening exercise that will be tough, but it's a necessary exercise to help you better determine what's important--and, almost as vital--what can be left out of your life. There are only 24 hours in the day, so stop spending hours doing to-do lists and start using that time to be more productive