Everybody seems so busy these days, flying around to this meeting or that conference, running from one appointment to the next, career-building, lining the nest, trying to make ends meet.
How many times have you heard someone close to you say with a note of rising desperation in their voice,"There aren't enough hours in the day!"?
Have you ever found yourself rushing from one task to the next, engaged in a manic race to check as many things off your to-do list for that day? Or do you even keep a list?
Hopefully you do not attempt to get through each day by the seat of your pants and operate with the assumption that you can keep a list in your head. Because if that's what you do, then you are wasting a lot of your valuable mental energy just warehousing the list and that is bound to create an additional load on your already over-loaded brain.
So don't do it!
It's a lot easier on your whole system to take a few minutes before the mad rush to sit down and write your list of the most pressing things that you really need (or want to) accomplish in the next day, next week and even next month.
Seriously.
Once you get it down on paper you can basically forget about it. More specifically, you can just concentrate on one item on your list at a time without stewing and brewing over the remaining tasks. Because really, multi-tasking is not all it's cracked up to be. When you try to do more than one thing at a time, you are risking the very real possibility that you will dilute your efforts so that nothing gets that well attended to. This will lead to dissatisfaction and a feeling that you are not accomplishing what you set out to do.
Just imagine the great feeling of putting all your energy, enthusiasm and desire into doing just one thing incredibly well. So what if a couple of things on your list fall by the way-side for that day. There's always tomorrow. You can just pick up where you left off after a good night's rest, knowing that you did your very best in the time you were given for that day. You will sleep like a baby knowing that you gave it your best shot and that tomorrow's another day.
I realize of course that this is quite elementary and almost everybody that reads this will probably think "Tell me something I don't already know!" but let me tell you, I happen to know several people off the top of my head who have not got it through their heads (and these are professional people with massive workloads...) that they can free themselves of some major stressers simply by taking the time on a religiously regular basis to put down in writing their short, medium and long-term priorities.
From my own experience as a very busy designer, artist and inventor who juggles quite a variety of tasks on a daily and weekly basis I can attest to the idea that a simple to-do list is my most powerful business and personal tool, period. Without belaboring the point, I can say this because once I have items on a list a certain feeling of personal power and calm settles into my day. I free myself to focus all of my creative energy on ONE THING at a TIME. Sounds simple enough but if you fail to do this, you will miss out on the deep satisfaction of concentration on the issue at hand as well as the knowing that your handy list will still be there once you are ready to strike off your current task and move on to the next thing.
The coolest thing about making a list is that you do not have to restrict the size or ambition of the items. You might knock two or three things off in one day, or it could take a month or more to slowly whittle away at a biggie. Just keep advancing your cause(s) and you can't go very far wrong.
Might sound trivial and obvious but not so much when you read the statistics on burn-out, job dis-satisfaction and most important of all, personal happiness.
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