Jun 28th, 2007

The Purpose-Driven To-Do List

By David Weliver

Staying organized, motivated, and on-task has a lot to do with our financial success. After all, if we can’t get things done, how do we expect to make money?

But have you ever caught yourself rewriting a to-do list five times a day or spending hours color-coding your emails? It’s easy to spend so much time trying to simplify our tasks that we never actually get anything accomplished.

Enter what I’m calling the “purpose-driven to-do list”.

Last night I was inspired by a post titled Purpose Your Day: Most Important Task from Zen Habits. The gist of it is this: wake up every day with a purpose. And whatever that purpose is; get it done.

The idea is that when it comes to productivity, less is more. Usually, accomplishing one big thing every day — even if you do nothing else — will get you ahead faster than if you spend all your time on smaller, less-meaningful chores.

Of course it’s possible that you won’t have one thing to do each day that’s so big it will consume all of your time. Some days you may be able to accomplish two or three big things.

So I created a to-do list based upon this principle. It’s a five-day weekly calendar with only four items for each day. There are boxes for your three most important daily tasks and a forth box for an item that may come up during the day that is too important to wait.

A good rule-of-thumb for choosing your most important task each day is to tie it directly to a long-term goal. Maybe it’s closing a new account at work to meet your annual earnings goal, or opening a savings account to meet a savings goal. Your most important task doesn’t have to be work-related, so I should create a seven-day version as well.

You can download a .pdf version of the Purpose-Driven To-Do List here.

Please give it a try. And let me know how it works for you, or if you have any suggestions.

Good luck!

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