5
Three Priorities a Day Keep Chaos and Clutter Away
Technique #4: Develop Strategies for Accomplishing the Most Important Action Items Each Day in Order to Meet Your Goals and Complete Projects on Time
Is your to-do list much longer than the time you have available each day to accomplish all of the items on it? If so, you are not alone; this is an all-too-common professional situation. Let’s face it: Your inbox will never be totally empty, and your to-do list will never be 100 percent complete. However, you can—and must—develop strategies for accomplishing the most important action items each day in order to meet your goals and complete your projects on time. But how do you do this?
The first step is to create a system that you will use and maintain each day that will track your to-dos or, as I like to call them, action items. You must have a place where you can store information from multiple sources, including everything you are trying to remember. Inputting this information into a system that works for you will set you up for success and diminish the chance that you’ll forget to do something or miss an important deadline.
There are many computer and cloud-based tools you can use to manage your action items, some of which I cover in more depth in Chapters 6 and 7. For those of you who are still a bit reluctant to use an electronic action item management system, there are, of course, paper-based solutions as well. You may even find that your ideal solution is a hybrid of electronic ...
