How to avoid 5 common to-do list mistakes

A few issues that may cause your to-do list to not serve you well – and what you can do about them:

1. Planning for too many tasks per day

Yes – technically you could get 10-20 things done, if they’re all really tiny short tasks. But if you’re working on bigger projects, you should make sure to keep your daily task list to a minimum. What are the 3 most important things you can do that day?

This is different though, if you have batched smaller tasks together, like scheduling out a few weeks’ worth of social media posts or taking care of your monthly financial tasks in one go.

But in theory, try to only have a max of 3 bigger tasks on your list for the day – the little things will get done in the cracks of time but the big ones won’t.

Let go of everything that doesn’t get you towards the goals you set for the current season (month, quarter or year?)

2. Treating everything as important

When tasks are on your to-do list, they all tend to look equally important. But which things are *actually* important to do that day, which ones could be done later, and which ones don’t need to be done at all?

3. Prioritizing business and family over yourself

If you put in business and family commitments first, and then *maybe* plan to do things for yourself in the margins – it can be a challenge to actually stick to those plans for yourself.

There’s a lot of talk about how we should “pay ourselves first” when we get our paycheck – aka put money into savings etc before we pay bills or shop anything else – and I think that applies to time management too.

Plan for yourself first. Whether you do what matters to you first thing in the morning, or schedule what matters into your calendar before filling in any other commitments is up to you. Putting yourself first is healthy, necessary, and the most beneficial thing you can do for yourself and for the people around you.

4. Working on the wrong things

I have been very guilty of this – working on *so many things* at once, and not focusing on the main thing that I really needed to focus on in that week or month.

Maybe I felt inspired to work on a part of a project that would’ve made sense to work on later in the process.

Maybe I worked on some projects, or was showing up on some platforms, because it seemed to be what everyone else was doing, or because someone had told me it was what I “had to” do to make things work.

Try to stick to working on the things that matter right now for most of your work time.

5. It’s never-ending

If you treat your to-do list as a dumping ground for all the ideas you’d like to do – without ever evaluating what’s on it – there’s a risk that it’ll always be at the back of your mind, weighing on you, and making you feel like you’re behind.

My approach is not to have an ongoing to-do list at all – I plan my tasks into my weeks and if something isn’t important enough to plan into my weeks, it’s probably not important enough to do.

Yes - it is good to keep a document or list of ideas that you get. But this should not be treated as a to-do list, but a “to-evaluate list”, or as an ideas list to pull from for when you do have the ability to tack on new projects into your schedule.