There is absolutely no shortage of to-do list apps that are available to you and me. Doing a quick search for productivity or to-do list in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store will give you a very long list of apps and task managers that can help you be more productive, help you be more efficient.
Some of the more popular ones include Wunderlist, Any.do, Clear, and Todoist, and in most cases, they're more than just an app, but they are cloud-based, so you can access them on your desktop as well. A few others that many people use to manage their tasks are Evernote and Google Keep.
Now, these are not really task list managers at their core; they're really more note-taking or note-capturing applications, but many people use the ability to create a checklist and to manage their tasks within such apps. Now, I don't usually recommend any of these apps for managing their to-dos because I find many of them overcomplicate the process of both adding new tasks and editing and managing those tasks.
If you're a longtime fan of Simpletivity, you probably know that I highly recommend Trello as an excellent to-do list. It is a great way to customize the way that you manage your tasks and, more importantly, be able to see your to-dos and your projects or bigger goals on the same screen.
But today, I want to show you an even simpler tool for managing your tasks, and you already have it. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you already use it, and it is your calendar.
That's right, it is your calendar. Whether it's Google Calendar as you see here and what I'll be using for an example today, whether it's Microsoft Outlook as your calendar, whether it's Apple's iCloud calendar, it doesn't matter what you are using; you can use your calendar as a very effective and very simple to-do list.
So as we look at my hypothetical week here, you see that I have a few events that I've listed here throughout the week: a couple of meetings, a couple of phone calls, including an all-day conference on the Tuesday. But way up top, you'll see on the Friday, I have in my all-day event row something called "weekly review."
Now, does that mean that I'm gonna spend the entire day doing a weekly review? No, certainly not.
I will not be spending all day doing my weekly review, but I use this area as an area to capture my to-dos and my tasks. So it doesn't really matter to me if I do my weekly review first thing or later in the day.
If I have a few things and meetings that get scheduled between now and then, I do know that I'm gonna make weekly review a priority. I use this area primarily as a to-do list, and you can too, to help you see the relationship between your to-dos and other things that are going on in your life.
To do so, you just need to click on this area and you can add a new task. So I'm going to put in a few here: "call Kevin regarding the meeting," hit enter, it appears.
I'm going to add another one here: "write the marketing report." And I'm going to "email Julie regarding the conference."
Okay, so there I have a few tasks that I want to be able to accomplish on that Tuesday. And now I can see the relationship between those to-dos and other things that I have on my workday, on my work week, the other things that are happening that are scheduled as a part of my day.
So, for example, I have an all-day conference that I'm going to be attending on Tuesday. The chances of me accomplishing all of these things, particularly writing this marketing report, are quite slim.
So it's so easy for me to simply click and drag, and I'm gonna defer that until Wednesday. I can still see it, I can still see how it relates to the rest of my week, but I've decided to move it from this Tuesday.
So it's really, really simple to be able to move around your tasks and give them an assignment on a specific day. And this can help you be more effective by managing several smaller to-do lists rather than one large giant to-do list.
So for example, you can manage as few as maybe four or five key tasks on a specific day instead of managing one really long list that maybe has 27 or 40 some items on them. You can break out your to-do list by specific days and see how they relate to one another.
So for example, here I have "call Kevin regarding the meeting." I can see that I'm actually meeting with Kevin on Thursday, and maybe that's why I decided to put that task on that Tuesday.
For example, I can see the relationship between my tasks and other things that are going on in my work week. So a few other things that you can benefit from managing your tasks in your calendar.
On the top level or on the front of your task, you can keep things nice and clean. You can keep the description of your to-do very short and sweet, but within it, you can add further details.
Now again, regardless of what calendar app you're using, you are going to have some type of description field or a notes field. So here you can add a URL to a website that you need.
You can add contact information for someone that you're going to call maybe for that particular meeting. You can copy and paste information into this area.
Often what I like to do for a number of my tasks is I'll be putting the next step. Okay, after I've completed writing the marketing report, what am I going to do next?
Sometimes I'll even just abbreviate that to "NS" and I'll say, you know, "send to Julie for review." So I can have all this detailed information within the task itself.
I'm just going to hit save. But of course, when I come back to my main calendar view, I can just see the task at hand.
This can be great when you're calling someone or sending that communication to someone. You can keep the description short and sweet, but you can have all the details in the description below.
Now lastly, you're probably thinking, Scott, isn't a key part of managing a to-do list or managing a task list having the ability to prioritize your list? How can I sort my list or highlight certain things?
Now, if you have followed some of my videos in the past already, you will know that I am not a big fan of prioritizing things by numbers or by letters or by multiple colors. The most important thing, and what's going to make you most effective in getting more done in a single day, is separating the "should do's" from the "could do's," really separating your most important work from everything else.
So what I recommend is that you only highlight your one or two most important tasks. Don't try and sort the entire list.
Now, from a calendar perspective, it can be difficult to reorder these items in the way that we want if we wanted to sort things, you know, top to bottom. We want to prioritize things one through seven.
However, there's a very simple tool, a very simple addition you can use to make sure your most important things appear at the top. So let's say, for example, that "write the marketing report" is the most important thing.
I want to make sure that I do that first or I at least see that first. By clicking on the title of this particular task, all you need to do is add a period or almost any other symbol.
I use a period since it's very small, still very easy to read. If you add a period and hit save, it will automatically bump it and sort it to the top of the list.
And this goes for most applications, including calendar applications. Let's say, you know, emailing Julie about the conference is the least important, just so I can show you in the example.
I go down to "email Julie," again I'm going to add a simple period, and now that is sorted to the top along with "write the marketing report." So as I said before, I think it's a waste of time giving a stack ranking of every single one of your tasks.
But if there are one or two that are most valuable or most important, you can simply add a period or some other symbol so that it will sort to the top of your list. So if you are looking for a very effective way to manage your tasks and to see your tasks in relation to everything else that is going on in your day or going on in your week, I suggest you use the all-day event area as a part of your calendar.
Whether it's Google, whether it's Outlook, whether it's Apple, it doesn't matter. They all have the same type of functionality.
You can manage your to-do lists right within the calendar. Until next time, it's very simple.
