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We live in a digital age, when it comes to remembering things, most of us rely on two things:

1. Some sort of task/project manager type software, be it from a simple Google doc or fancy management software like basecamp or the likes
2. Our memory

Now, there’s nothing wrong with either scenario, however there are a number of down sides to each one, as there is with everything, but here are two quick view points:

1. Depending on online software requires you to always have access to the Internet and it also puts it out there, where there is the potential for a breach. With offline software it’s hugged to one location only in most cases.
2. As humans, we were blessed with a muscle, which when exercised becomes and incredible tool, but when it comes to tasks like invoicing or remembering to contact someone, it’s better to put this down somewhere and rather store more important things in your memory, it’s somewhat limited, maximize its use.

The point I’m getting at here, is that it’s important to learn to seperate what is vital and what isn’t. Remember to send an invoice might appear vital, and it is, but it’s something you can forget about, rather let something else remind you that it has to be sent, than storing it in your mind and praying that you remember. There are tons of things we all have to remember, being able to avoid information overload, will result in you remembering the most important things, everything else can be remembered by a piece of paper, or I’d rather suggest a whiteboard, simply because I think the “green” vibe is good!

How do you seperate what you really need to remember and what can be remembered by something else?

When I started working as an Operations Manager, I had many years of experience as a SEO and as a developer, so the number of skills I had to learn were quite frightful and the transition was difficult, but I stuck with it and I think I’m quite good at being an Operations Manager. Along the way I learnt a lot and that’s what I’m going to try and share with you this evening.

1. Stop looking at everything – It’s so common to sit and stare at a huge list of tasks, forcing yourself to feel overwhelmed and thus unmotivated. You know that feeling, the one where you just want to run and hide, of course you do. Well, unfortunately this isn’t an option most of the time.
2. Plan – I tell you, coming from a development background, one thing I was rather bad at was planning (When I talk about planning, I an referring to putting down timelines, priorities and so forth). Having a plan is the secret to completing your tasks, without one you’re bound to either miss deadlines or miss details – both will result in problems.
3. One by One – My secret to successfully getting through a lot of work is tackling one task at a time, always. If you jump around between tasks, you’re going to face several problems:
   • Exhaustion because your brain is going in and out of different “topics”.
   • Confusion, in most cases you’ll be doing different tasks, but most probably related tasks, it’s easy to get confused.
   • Time wasting, if you’re moving from task to task before completing tasks, you will find yourself wasting time on checking where you stand the whole time.
   • Anxiety – For me, this is the worst. If I don’t know where I stand or get lost in my tasks, I get anxious and when this happens, things go slowly downhill.
4. Group – Grouping tasks is something that can honestly save you more time than you can imagine. It doesn’t result in confusion, but rather allows you to leverage results from one task to complete another. It’s a difficult one to explain, but it will become apart later in this post.
5. Congratulate – I find it important to tell myself “well done”, when I complete a task, regardless of whether it’s task 1 on a list of 1000 tasks, or task 999; each time I completely something, congratulating myself makes me feel good and it motivates me to moving onto the next task. Congratulations can be anything, a cigarette break, a snack, a swim, a quick TV show; you need to find what works for you, the secret being that the event is short and doesn’t result in you completing losing focus. A lot of people find that putting a big line through a task on paper does the job for them ;)
6. Track – Continually track where you stand, note your timelines, note your priorities and mark things off when they’re done. Being able to easily see where you stand will save you a lot of time – they key here is to be able to note where you stand with a quick look, we want to avoid the confusing of figuring out where you stand, as this is a huge time waster.

(I’m going for a cigarette now to congratulate myself for getting through part one of this post)

So, those are 6 points that came to mind whilst writing this and thinking about how I go about doing tasks when I have a huge list of them. I’m tired of reading articles which list things to watch out for, but never offer advice as to how to avoid them or what to do, so I’m going to see if I can put something together that you can learn and take with you, and hopefully try next time you’re feeling incredible pressure.

Take a piece of paper, and write down your tasks. I’ll do an example for you, which relates to me:

• SEO Audit
• Get kitten food
• Blog Post
• Cash Cheques
• Get kitten food
• Develop Admin Area for website
• Update CV
• Talk to John about Interface Design
• Set up meeting
• Watching ESA bass fishing show

Ok, so that’s 10 tasks that I think will serve as an example of what I’ve talked about thus far. With each task I ask myself a number of questions, for the sake of this exercise I’m going to not use the ones I ask myself, but rather give you some good examples:

1. When is it due?
2. Will I be in trouble at work if I miss the deadline?
3. Will it bring me money?
4. Will someone be hurt if I don’t do it immediately?
5. Will I fail the course if it’s late?

Now, I use about 10 questions for each task and the importance of these questions is that they determine the priority of each task. You might think that you can just do it in your head, and you probably can if you only ask one or two questions, but the secret is to create a list of good questions that really allow you to determine priorities. If you only have a couple questions, you’ll find yourself struggling to prioritize one task over another. And yes, in time you’ll have the list in your head, but start with it on paper – trust me.

Here’s the list reformatted in order of priority based on the questions as well as the 5 points above. I’ve put explanations in brackets to give you some kind of idea as to why.

• Set up meeting (Although setting up a meeting could be seen as less important as the SEO Audit or Development, it’s going to take a lot less time and once it’s set up, you can forget about it)
• SEO Audit + Development (These items are part of my job, I need my job so I can get a salary every month. I have also grouped the two tasks together because they are related)
• Kitten Food, Cash Cheques (these two tasks involve going out. If the cats don’t have food, they’ll not survive, so this is obviously very important. The idea here is to obviously determine whether this should be done before the other tasks based on when the kittens last ate, etc.)
• Blog Post (I need to get a blog post up about an event happening on the weekend, if I don’t get the blog post up, I will lose out on traffic on my blog, but I won’t get fired, my kittens won’t starve and therefore it’s not a priority)
• Talk to John (This task requires at least an hour of conversation, now the tricky here is to probably contact John at the same time you set up the meeting as they’re similar tasks and set up a time to talk to John, setting up a time allows you to plan around it.)
• Update CV (I have a job, so ensuring that my CV is updated might be important, but it’s far less important than the others, so it can fall in at the end, in fact, it might be a good idea to do this after my TV show, because the show could be a great break from the work).
• ESA Bass (This is something fun and definitely not as important as the others. However, taking breaks is essential and for your health, you might feel that this task should be slotted in a bit higher up between two big tasks)

Easiest thing to spot is that you now have 7 tasks and not 10 any more, because of the grouping. You also have a neat list of things in the order they should be. Tackle each one, one by one and only look at the list again when you complete a task, not during the task. I haven’t attached times to these tasks, but you should attached times, planning is all about timelines!

Something I haven’t included in the 6 points above, is Environment, it’s important to ensure that you’re in the right environment for the various tasks, but that’s a whole topic on its own.

What I’ve written above sounds obvious and perhaps it is, but I know from experience that I was someone who would have read this and thought to myself, “duh”, but only when I physically started writing things down, attaching priorities and timelines, rewarding myself and keeping track of what I was doing, did I start to learn about handling a great deal of tasks within a tight timeline.

I’m continually asked how I manage to do ask much as I can do, and it’s simply because I do what I’ve written above. It might take you an hour in the beginning to get your list ready, which you might think will waste time, but believe me, an hour in the beginning is better than a couple of hours of confusion or rush, later.

I hope this posts reaches a few of you who are struggling, and more importantly, I hope it helps you!

PS. I’m not spelling checking or rereading this post, because:

1. I won’t lose my job if I don’t
2. It won’t lose me money
3. Nobody will be hurt (except those anal copywriters)
4. I won’t fail a course

.. I’ve got more important things to do, like getting my kitties food!