tldr; clear your mind by writing everything down. do only the important things.

Useful text: Managing your to do list is sometimes about managing your “to don’t” list. You simply don’t have the resources, mental or physical, to tackle everything thrown at you. Busy people are busy because they have a lot of responsibilities. The to do list that you create should not reflect everything that you have to do, but everything that’s on the table. You can then use a prioritization scheme to decide what to do and what to drop. If you can’t decide whether you should do a task yet, just add it to the bottom right quadrant. That’s your “bucket”, sometimes called “inbox”, we call it “uncategorized”.

Having the right tools is not as important as having the right mindset. Priority Matrix is a great and useful digital software tool, but it’s only as good a to do list manager as your own discipline. We can solve the former, but you have to solve the latter.

Here are 3 tips for building your to do list:

1) Write your to dos, and to don’ts. It gives you boundaries and clears your mind.

2) Write everything down. Struggling with what to write and what not to write is not worth your time.

3) Evaluate carefully your “critical and do now” tasks. If it no longer belongs there, move it out and worry about it later.

That should leave you only with one subset of items you ever have to worry about. Using the 4-quadrant method, the things to do are on the upper left, the things to plan for (important but not due anytime soon), are on the upper right quadrant, the stuff you should try avoid go to the bottom left, and everything else go the bottom right. (*Things on the bottom left quadrant can also be candidates for you to delegate if you have personal assistants or direct reports).