Managing Tasks

Quick reference

• 00:04 Hello everyone and welcome to this GoSkills course all about Todoist.
• 00:08 Now in this feature, we're diving into managing tasks inside your Todoist
• 00:12 account, helping you to really optimize your account for best practice.
• 00:17 Now as you can imagine, once you get your Todoist account,
• 00:20 the natural thing to do is overload it with tasks.
• 00:22 You have so many on your mind and
• 00:24 sometimes putting them all in really does help you to relax and keep you calm.
• 00:29 But a lot of people add them to the Today list and
• 00:32 this can get pretty overwhelming, this is called Task Overload.
• 00:36 Overloading your account with too many task can be really stressful sometimes,
• 00:41 and provide some really negative impacts on your account.
• 00:44 So we're going to show you a few best practices.
• 00:46 But first, the disadvantages of Task Overload, there are things that really
• 00:50 naturally come and negatives that come from Task Overload that you need to know.
• 00:55 A lot of them reside around stress and anxiety.
• 00:57 You can really build up stress and
• 00:59 anxiety when you see too many tasks in front of you.
• 01:02 The pressure to complete the tasks, you see this big list and
• 01:05 you're like, when do I need to complete them?
• 01:07 How do I need to complete them?
• 01:08 And you panic and that could be really stressful.
• 01:11 You can also damage your habits and routines.
• 01:13 If you've got too many tasks on there,
• 01:15 you can't get to the stuff that really do matter to your daily habits and
• 01:19 improving yourself, for example, it could damage you meditation habit or
• 01:23 something else that you do, making sure that you clean house on a regular basis.
• 01:28 And you also set yourself up for failure, if you've got way too many tasks on that
• 01:31 list, you're just going to be adding them for the next day, and the next day, and
• 01:34 the next day.
• 01:35 And that can be really stressful, and also it can really damage your confidence too.
• 01:40 Now, in terms of best practices on the right,
• 01:43 we have a worked example and we're going to go through a few of the ways
• 01:46 that it makes a better practice when it comes to using Todoist.
• 01:50 Now as you can see on this right hand side, you have an example of some Todoist
• 01:54 tasks and today, they include round about three to five tasks and
• 01:58 that really is a good amount of tasks in your day.
• 02:00 You want to be clear and concise of what you want to complete.
• 02:04 They need to be achievable in terms of their writing.
• 02:06 You can see on this right hand side finish report for
• 02:09 Simon, learn 10 words of Portuguese, they're very clear and
• 02:12 concise, water all indoor plants and not very intrusive or long.
• 02:17 You can also see that organized based on priority too, so
• 02:20 you can see the red at the top and the lower level priorities at the bottom.
• 02:24 You can also as well see the time orientation,
• 02:28 you can actually add a time to each of these tasks.
• 02:30 But you can see here that in order to reduce task overload,
• 02:33 you have given yourself a lot of room for adding more tasks and
• 02:38 also to complete these tasks and really focus on what matters during the day.
• 02:43 Now the goal of managing tasks is really, really simple.
• 02:45 You want to streamline your task manager, you want to have tasks set intentional,
• 02:51 no inclusion of unnecessary tasks.
• 02:53 You want to provide a lot of task context, as well as make them achievable and
• 02:58 importance focused, versus actually just looking to get things done
• 03:02 based on actually getting them done, and having them in front of you.
• 03:05 Some recommended reading around this,
• 03:07 you could check out Make Time by John Zeratsky & Jake Knapp.
• 03:11 There's also Getting Things Done, which is a really good book to helping you.
• 03:15 We've also got the Essential Productivity Training,
• 03:17 which might help you to promote the positive habits around your task manager.
• 03:22 Those books will provide an insightful guide to prioritizing your tasks,
• 03:25 I particularly found it very helpful.
• 03:28 Now in terms of your exercise, you're going to create your own toady list,
• 03:32 you'll set up a full working day and sign up todoist.
• 03:35 Minimizing any noise and reducing the mess in your today tab and
• 03:38 that'd really be helpful to help improve that practice.
• 03:42 Join us in the next section about how to manage your team project.
• 03:47 Thank you very much, guys and I'll see you in the next feature, cheers!

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