Many people find that they can create a to do list, but often fail to complete the tasks that they really want to do. The list of tasks either sits there not getting done, or something will get started and not finished. Any number of reasons may come out as to why it doesn’t get done, what is stopping you or how it was to difficult.
In reality it is not that hard to create a to do list that gets done. All it takes is actually making yourself accountable to the to do list. Not really that the to do list it self will start talking to you and pushing you along, but start to score your to do list. I started doing this about 3 weeks ago, taking item’s on my to do list and giving them a point score value if i get them done.
So the basic idea is easy enough, but the full way i will do this comes down to making it more essential to do the big things i don’t really want to do to avoid a bad score. For example i decided a few days ago i wanted to move my Business website (http://www.orionnetworks.com.au) onto WordPress. As with anything you want to time the change of a website, but you also want to make sure that you don’t mess it up. Anyway i put it on the to do list on Saturday, and didn’t get it done. So again listed Sunday, and i did get it done.
Changing my website, i gave 6 pts, which does make a decent impact to your score if you miss, and it sure does motivate you the next time you list something as such to actually look to make sure it happens.
Where to start, well i started by defining an absolute base these are the minimum things i would like to get done each day, which includes things like status updates, commenting on blogs, forum posts, creating new content for my sites, and creating new blog posts, along with checking stats and such. All up my base score without any other to do items is 33 pts. However on average i have anything from 2 to 10 other items, adding on average 10 pts per day. At the present time my average completed points comes in at just 15 pts on average per day. Which works out to about a 33% achievement of items completed to possible total points.
What i ahve found my creating a to do list that i actually score for myself is that i do really need to improve my ability to get things done and not to continue with time wasters, and seeing low scores without really being able to explain them is the thing that i dislike the most.