Yesterday I was the super man of productivity. No, I didn’t leave the house to isolate myself from the rest of the world. No, I didn’t feel particularly energetic. I simply had planned the day with some concrete things to work on, and spent about half the day trying to get these things done. Many of the items on my list were things that I’ve been dragging my feet about for a couple of weeks, which probably explains part of why I feel good about doing them, but still.

I’ve talked about 3 tasks before and reiterated the value of daily task items, but I’m just so profoundly amazed by the power of this simple method that I feel compelled to talk about it one more time, this time with a few tips on how you could possibly make this part of your daily habit (hopefully the stuff about how I do it makes it more concrete, don’t mean to imply that I’m doing it the best way :) ):

• Have a daily list. Probably obvious, but just the simple act of deciding what to do tomorrow will make you much more likely to actually do these things. And don’t cram everything into your daily list, it needs to be comfortably doable in a single day.Here’s how I do it: I use OmniFocus for all my task management, and I create the daily list the night before by setting tasks as due that day. I don’t keep a lot of tasks due (only stuff that’s truly, really, something-bad-will-happen-if-I-don’t-do-it-by-this-day due) so the list isn’t crowded by other stuff. The “Due” perspective will then show me my daily list so I can chop away.
• Have an “all” list. Keep a pile, and understand that the pile will never go away. Whenever something comes to your mind, add it to the pile. Whenever something isn’t relevant anymore, remove it from the pile. But by all means, don’t try to remember everything, and don’t keep 27 piles. Try to have one pile. Here’s how I do it: With OmniFocus, this is natural – all my tasks are in there.
• Make the list mobile. If you put the list into a Word document, it’s probably going to be useful for you about half the time. The other half (or even more for some people) you’re going to be away from your computer, and you’ll forget what you had planned to do. Figure out a way to make the daily list go with you no matter where you go, even writing it down on paper is better than a computer-only based solution. Here’s how I do it: OmniFocus has a mobile version for iPhone, which I check all the time when I’m on the go. I just wish they had an Android version…
• Make the list actionable. “Learn how to read faster” is not a daily action item, but “Set up a schedule for learning how to read faster” or “measure baseline reading performance” are. Make sure you distinguish between projects (or dreams!) and actual tasks. It takes lots of tasks to finish a project (or make a dream come true).Here’s how I do it: I ask myself every time I put down an action, “can I do this at a given time and location tomorrow?” – if not, I need to either figure out prerequisites (e.g. before I file taxes, I need to gather all documents for the filing) or break it up (e.g. learning Spanish takes a series of steps which I need to be more concrete about).
• Keep your routine stuff, well, routine and time boxed. There’s always stuff you do every day, or several times a day, and although usually important, they are potentially your biggest barriers to getting anything else done (email is the prime example, with Facebook probably a strong second). The key is to be deliberate about this, know what routine stuff you care about, when you do it and for how long. Here’s how I do it: My routine is email (personal and work), Google Reader (for news and interesting bits from people I like reading from), Facebook, Twitter, Mint.com (reconciling transactions is much easier if you it every day, believe me!) and Wikipedia’s front page (I know that’s a weird one, but there’s usually something interesting there that’s not news or based on current events). First thing I do after breakfast and dropping the girls off at school, is to open a browser window with one tab per before-mentioned site, and then give myself 30 minutes to jam through all of them. After that, the routine is out of my system for the day (doesn’t mean I won’t come back briefly during the day, but I never let any of these services distract me from more important work).
• Tasks vs projects. I briefly touched on this above, but it’s so important to know the distinction: a task is something you can do, and a project is a collection of tasks that get you to a meaningful destination or milestone. It’s also important to track both. If you only track tasks, your life will just be a random collection of stuff that you do without any context. If you only track projects, you’ll never actually do anything. Here’s how I do it: since OmniFocus has this exact same distinction, this is very easy for me. I create, delete, and check off projects and tasks in one place, which is pretty convenient.
• Keep your long term stuff aligned. It’s important that you periodically look up from the trenches and figure out if you’re on the path you want to be on. Are the tasks you’ve noted down aligned with your bigger ambitions? Remember, neither can live without the other: you need to know where you’re heading, and you need to figure out the steps to get there. Here’s how I do it: I use projects (and sub-projects if needed) to set my longer term direction. If I have ambitions to remodel my home, I will create a project for that, even if there are no immediate tasks in there for the foreseeable future (although for anything you care about, you will start seeing ways to chip away at the project, even if it’s small bits at a time). Just like the pile of tasks that you shouldn’t be afraid of or expect to go away, keep a pile of projects, even if some of them are completely dormant and you know will take a long time to finish. It’s having these things in front of you that will help you take slow, but deliberate, steps towards finishing them at some point in the future.
• Just do it. Nike was right. in order to get things done, it’s often just a matter of having an attitude of doing stuff. Don’t get distracted by things that you haven’t decided to do, go ahead and finish that daily list, and then go get distracted by all the fun stuff. You’ll thank yourself later.

Procrastination, in my opinion, is often just because we haven’t figure out exactly what steps we need to take to achieve a given outcome. Setting up a daily task list is a very powerful tool to fight that behavior.

Do you have other tips on how to get more stuff done? Please do share in the comments, as usual :)

- Gummi