People who know me well know that I can do many things at once. So, people often ask me, what are the good habits, efficient learning methods, can improve efficiency?
That’s true. Today, I’m going to start with the following two questions and talk about how I’ve improved my productivity.
1. Why is it important to you to manage tasks?
The most important thing to know before you do something is how much it means to you so that you have the motivation and willingness to do it. In this section we’ll talk about how to manage your tasks so that you can excel your peers.
- What are the three principles that must be followed to manage work tasks?
In this section, I’ll show you how to design a daily task management checklist using three principles that will help you avoid low levels of diligence, using my own real life examples.
Why is it important to you to manage your work?
When you arrive at work in the morning and turn on your computer, all you see is a mess of desktop files. The boss at this time came to say that the recent arrangement of several work tasks, stem how, a moment report. You are anxious because it is not finished yet.
After some work, you think you should take a break, so you take out your phone and see the red dot in your moments. Then you swipe it. You think it will only take one or two minutes anyway. However, when I looked up after finishing the painting, I found that most of the time had passed and I still had a lot of work to do.
All of a sudden, the mess disrupts your schedule, and you think it’s just someone else’s stupid, sudden increase in your workload.
While you’re doing one thing, you suddenly think of another important thing that you need to do first. It’s all the same.
You seem to be busy every day, but at the end of the day you don’t know what you got done, and there are even a lot of things left to do.
How can you solve these problems and increase your productivity?
The root cause of these problems is that you don’t know how to manage your work tasks.
So, the question is, why can managing tasks avoid these problems?
This is because managing tasks prevents us from making mistakes. Human mistakes can be divided into two types in the picture below.
You made a mistake because you didn’t have the right knowledge or didn’t have the relevant knowledge. For example, if you didn’t know you had to consider the possibility of an earthquake to build your house, you could have done it in the wrong place or with the wrong materials.
Or you have not learned the knowledge of statistical probability, use all your assets to start a business, and finally fail to start a business, and even have no capital to turn over, this is because you do not understand the knowledge of risk in probability.
This kind of mistake can be avoided by acquiring certain knowledge through study.
2) The second is the fault of incompetence
It refers to the mistake you make when you have the right knowledge but don’t use it correctly. For example, if you are an airline pilot and you know all the procedures before takeoff, but you forget to unlock the rudder (Duo) before takeoff and the plane crashes, it is the fault of incompetence.
This tragedy of incompetence is a real one. During a demonstration for the US military, Boeing’s B17 bomber crashed after the pilot forgot to lock the rudder during takeoff, almost bankrupting the company.
It’s not just something like the bomber accident, we make all kinds of mistakes in our working lives. For example, remembering the wrong time for a meeting. Another example is that there are too many tasks at work every day and they don’t manage them well, so many things don’t get done at the end of the day.
Mistakes of incompetence, which could have been avoided, are repeated. Why is that?
That’s because we humans can’t remember everything. For example, if you have just answered a call from a client, and another call comes in, and a colleague comes to talk to you about a meeting right after the call, you may forget the promise you made on the first call and the client will be upset.
You see, it’s not that you can’t complete a client’s task, it’s that there’s too much going on and you forget. This is very common. People tend to forget things in stressful situations.
So, the question is, how do you avoid the fault of incompetence?
In fact, it’s as simple as using a single tool to manage multiple tasks (I use Youdao Cloud Note everyday, which can record things I want to do anytime and anywhere on my phone and computer).
At this point you might say, this is very common, how can it help us avoid the mistake of incompetence?
The following images show two functions of the tool for managing multiple tasks.
When we use tools to manage multiple tasks, we’re outsourcing the tasks that our brains need to remember to tools.
Remember, the brain’s ability to remember things under stress is pretty unreliable. There is a saying called the magic number seven, which states that the brain can remember up to seven things at once before it stops. Other experiments by brain scientists have demonstrated that the brain may only be able to remember four memory blocks at once.
Either way, we all know that the brain is prone to making mistakes when things are busy and stressful.
Using tools to manage tasks allows the brain to outsource memory, allowing it to focus on judgment and avoid making mistakes because of its memory limitations.
The second function is to manage the task of data analysis.
When we record work tasks into a tool, the data can be analyzed to find potential risks. I once made an analysis of one of my management tasks and saved 10,000 yuan per month.
We now understand that the use of tools to manage tasks is important because it allows us to avoid the fault of incompetence.
Third, summary
We talked about managing tasks at work and why it’s important to you.
Because using tools to manage multiple tasks allows us to avoid mistakes of incompetence. Using tools to manage multiple tasks is like outsourcing the tasks your brain needs to remember to tools. At the same time, we can use tools to analyze multiple data points to discover potential risks.
I will continue to tell you, what are the three principles that you must follow to manage work tasks?
I’ll use my own real-life examples to show you how to design a daily task management checklist using three principles that will help you avoid low levels of diligence.
What are the three principles that must be followed to manage work tasks?
In this section, I’ll show you how to design a daily task management checklist using three principles that will help you avoid low levels of diligence, using my own real life examples.
1. The principle of a
The first principle is that task management lists should be designed to be simple and executable.
Similarly, task management doesn’t have to be exhaustive. Instead of listing all the DOS and don ‘ts and actions, find the key things we need to be reminded of.
Executable means that the task management list is operable. I’ve seen people write down several pages of tasks that look awesome and then end up on the toilet. It’s just undoable.
No matter how many dreams you have, the unexecutable end is cannon fodder. You think about it, if let you go back to the company’s personnel management regulations, you certainly can’t back, this is not executable.
The table in the picture below is a task management list from my previous work at IBM, which is used to record daily tasks. It follows this principle.
1) Column 1 time
This column does not break the time into hours and hours, because in practice you cannot break the time into too much detail. Because you may be doing one thing and suddenly your boss is doing another thing.
Therefore, it is unrealistic to divide your time into hours for work. To keep things simple, I’ve divided the day into three periods: morning, afternoon, and evening. Simple enough.
You may have noticed that in the time column there are tasks for morning and afternoon trips, which I have assigned to my fragmented time system. I used to read e-books when I was on the way to work, such as by subway or bus.
Don’t underestimate the fragmentation time. While others are checking Weibo and playing Douyin, you can finish several chapters of a book.
From college to my current job, I have maintained this habit, and many of my book reviews, as well as my drafts, are done on the road. In this way, on average, we study 2 hours more than others every day, which is destined to surpass our peers.
What I’m talking about here is fragmented time learning, not like many people like to read a few articles in the circle of friends on the way, today learn this, tomorrow learn that. He seems very busy, but he has only scratched the surface and is not proficient in any field.
Generally, I have a long-term goal, for example, to become an expert in a certain field, and I study systematically in this direction. Fragmented time is just a form of systematic learning.
As you can see, I schedule myself an hour of running every evening. Why make this habit?
Because running not only allows me to do self-reflection and a sense of relief, it also cures procrastination by making a person stick to something for a long time, cultivating patience.
2) Column 2
Let’s go back to column 2 of the daily to-do list, which lists the things to do that day.
Column 3 deadline indicates the deadline by which each task is to be completed. This reminds me of what needs to be done before the deadline and prevents me from procrastinating and not getting it done.
According to a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 80 percent of college students and 86 percent of workers in China suffer from procrastination.
50% of people never start work until the last minute. Thirteen percent can’t get their work done without being prodded.
Let’s face it, deadlines are a great invention, and many companies would have stopped working without them.
4) Column 4
The fourth column in this daily task management list is status. I will check each task to see if it has been completed before I leave work and then record it in this column.
To keep the design simple and executable, I only fill in two values in the fourth column state, either completed or unfinished.
Keeping it simple enough makes the daily to-do list easy to implement because you don’t need to remember much.
2. The principle of two
The second rule to follow in managing to-do lists is to have clear checkpoints on execution. What is a checkpoint?
Similarly, to make the daily task management list useful, there are checkpoints that tell us when to use the task management list.
In the daily task management list designed earlier, I set up two checkpoints.
The first checkpoint is before the task happens, first thing in the morning, to open the task management list and see what to do today. This ensures that the mission goes smoothly.
The second checkpoint is the last thing you do after a task has happened and before you leave work, which is to open the task management list, check what you did today, and mark what you did and didn’t do in the status column.
For a task management list to be sustainable, it is important to keep it simple and executable, and to have such checkpoints in place. Like a dashboard alarm, these clear checkpoints tell us when to use a to-do list to avoid risk.
Three (3) principle
The third principle that must be followed in managing work tasks is that the contents of the task management list should be constantly updated.
To be usable, task management lists must constantly be realistic, and what can’t be used today is a relic of the past
Step 1: Delete completed tasks Step 2: Add new tasks to be done the next day Step 3: Prioritize tasks.
Many people like to add a column after the task to indicate the level of the task, such as unimportant, not urgent, urgent not important, etc.
This looks clear, but it’s hard to execute. Because when you have tasks to do, further identify which tasks need to be completed first. This violates the first level principle: simple and executable.
Because the human eye sees things from the top down, WHAT I do is rank tasks in order of importance from top to bottom, and the first ones are the ones that need to be done first, so that you can see which ones need to be done first in the list.
Why prioritize tasks? Isn’t it an emergency?
Many people don’t have the habit of prioritizing their tasks. They just do whatever comes to mind. At the end of the day, they seem busy, but their productivity and performance are low. The reason for this is that tasks are not prioritized.
3. Prioritize: People who prioritize their tasks have the initiative to control and optimize their time. As long as priorities are present, the person’s behavior follows a power-law distribution.
This is because you set priorities, and the response time to each problem becomes fairly uneven, with some tasks being performed immediately and others being pushed back forever or even shelved indefinitely.
If you want to get a sense of how power law distribution can change the lives of individuals, you can read this article THAT I wrote earlier, “People who know this, who know these two business models, are financially free.”
Now that you understand the importance of prioritizing tasks, you may be asking, Monkey, I’m still not good at prioritizing tasks. Is there a good way to do this?
This picture shows how I prioritize my daily tasks, and it’s a recipe for you to practice.
If you plot time from unimportant to urgent on the horizontal axis, and things from unimportant to important on the vertical axis. This divides the whole space into four quadrants. This is the four-quadrant approach to time management.
The first quadrant is urgent and important matters that must be dealt with first and resolved first. For example, important meeting work.
The second quadrant is something that is not urgent in time, but has an important effect on us. For example, if you learn a new skill, it is important for your future job or career development.
I tend to do important tasks in the morning, when my brain is freshest and most productive. Writing code, analyzing data, and writing manuscripts requires brain cells and requires only one brain to be efficient.
The third quadrant contains things that are urgent but not important, things that are urgent but not important.
We must note, in particular, that things in this quadrant are highly deceptive. A lot of people have the misconception that urgent things are important when, in fact, they don’t matter, such as indifferent phone calls, echoing the expectations of others.
For example, the leader asks you to contact a customer before going off work whether the system has been developed. The matter may seem urgent, but it is not important. So you can do it in the afternoon, because your brain isn’t as efficient as it is in the morning. Some people put such things in the morning to finish, and occupy their own important things, is not worth the gain.
So, you see colleagues in the same company who, after a few years, are still in the same job because of the wrong priorities, while others have improved their skills and moved up the ladder.
Most of the tasks in the fourth quadrant are trivial and have no time urgency or importance. For example, you can arrange unimportant tasks at work for the afternoon.
I think I work more efficiently and with higher quality than everyone around me because I always put important, non-urgent tasks to work in the morning, when one brain is most alert and productive. Leave the rest of the clutter and unimportant tasks to the afternoon.
4. To summarize
1) In Part 1, we talked about why managing tasks at work is important to you.
Because using tools to manage multiple tasks allows us to avoid mistakes of incompetence. Using tools to manage multiple tasks is like outsourcing the tasks your brain needs to remember to tools. At the same time, we can use tools to analyze multiple data points to discover potential risks.
2) In part 2, I used my own practice case, daily task management checklist, and we talked about three principles that must be followed to manage work tasks.
If you’ve studied these carefully, you’ve learned how to use tools to design daily to-do lists to increase your productivity.