To-do lists : staying productive at home

To-do lists : staying productive at home

Translated by Nancy Panagoulopoulou
Based on the original article in Greek by Marios Anastasiou

Are you wondering how are you going to work effectively from home? If you are, the answer hides behind a simple phrase: to-do lists. Or, put simply, checklists. These lists are what you need to be doing every workday in order to know the tasks you’ll need to be performing each day.

Why to-do lists matter

To-do lists are the basis of every fruitful effort in work. But given the new “work from home” trend, they are now crucial. And that is because our time at-work tends to become one with time off-work, something that displeases many employees. Anyway, who wants to work all day and simultaneously have to deal with children, family and pets?

The image of an employee trying to contact their employer while calming their dog down is comical to say the least. But the results of this image might not be so funny. That’s why we should take a brief look into how to cohere a to-do list.

Suggestions

In our “to-do list” efforts, we need to use the valuable advice of two specialists. Emma Donaldson-Feilder, psychologist and Rachilda Benamar, life coach. They both focus on setting goals and priorities. First long-term priorities and then short term. However, setting goals is not enough on its own. Coherent to-do lists divide work-tasks in order of importance.

Donaldson-Feilder claims that work-tasks are divided in four categories; “important and urgent”, “important – non-urgent”, “urgent – non-important”, and finally “non-important – non-urgent”.

On the other hand, Benamar, adopts a much simpler approach. She suggests setting the three most basic work-related tasks on a daily basis. She supports that the tasks setting needs to happen early in the morning. In order to eventually lead to writing the actual to-do list. She also opines that to-do-lists should never include more than 5 written tasks.

Additional categories

Additionally, she agrees with Donaldson-Feildern that one to-do-list is enough. Otherwise, people might get confused and fail. Benamar emphasizes the specification of work-related tasks. According to her, it’s not enough to say that on day X we’ll work on writing a book. We have to define that tat day we’ll work on. For example, brainstorming on major plot points.

Based on that example, it becomes clear that we have to mention “time management”. Benamar suggests writing to-do lists on paper or electronic daily journals. Whatever the form is, daily journals should mention the time when each work-related task is to be completed. Also, the time required for the task to be completed, needs to be mentioned.

Finally, the reasonable advice of specialists concern the use of simple, upon conception, tips. Scheduling, fruitful time-management and specification are the key-words of the composition of a to-do list. The only thing left is to finish and apply this to-do list to good use!

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