Prioritizing Your To-Do List: Getting the Right Things Done

If you are anything like me, you can't get to the bottom of your to-do list. It's one of the reasons I created this blog. What can I say? I'm just a boy who cain't say no. I'm going to leave "learning to say no" for another day, but today, I'd like to talk about to-do lists and getting the right things on it done.

A decade ago, I worked for a top 20 Internet company managing one of its most profitable properties: Search. It was a lot of pressure for me at 24 years old. Fortunately, the Vice President of Content had a lot of confidence in my abilities and we really clicked. It wasn't too long after we started working together that we came across the problem that everyone encounters at one point or another. The VP had a bunch of things he wanted to accomplish and I was just one engineer. With limited time and resources, something had to give.

I suggested that we try something very different. I told him to make a list of all the tasks that need to get done. Separately we tackled that list in a couple of different ways. I went through and estimated how easy the task was to accomplish. He gave each task on the list a score based on how important it was to the business. We each used a 10 point scale - 10 was "easy" on mine and 10 was "very important" on his. Then we simply multiplied our scores and sorted on the result in descending order. The bottom 30% of the list got tabled indefinitely as not worth the effort. The easy stuff with the big impact to the business bubbled up to the top 30% of the list. In a few days, I implemented all these features and the bosses were really happy with what we accomplished. The middle 40% took me another month, but it was a quiet month as the bosses moved on to torture harass supervise other projects.

Recently I was reading Never Check E-Mail In the Morning and Julie Morgenstern suggested a similar thing.

I decided to resurrect that idea, incorporate it with the ideas from the book and came up with a new way of managing my to-do list. As I've found in the past, Excel (or spreadsheet equivalent) is the right tool for the job.

Here is a snapshot of what it looks like:

Task	Category	Revenue Relevance	Time to Complete	ROI	Deadline	Value	Notes:
Collect money from Tony	Finances	8	8	9	9	5184
Read Erica.biz' Guest Post Secrets	Promotion	6	6	7	6	1512
Write Posts	Product Development	9	2	9	6	972
Update Ad Sales Books	Finances	2	6	8	5	480
Guest Post for Get Rich Slowly	Promotion	5	2	9	5	450
Add My Photo to Theme	Promotion	2	8	6	3	288
Ask others about possible Guest Post openings	Promotion	2	9	7	2	252
Find a Twitter list of Productive Bloggers	Promotion	2	9	5	2	180
Create a Facebook Page	Promotion	2	7	5	2	140

My metrics are:

• Revenue Relevance - It's hard to downplay the actual money factor.
• Time to Complete - My original idea of quantifying how hard something is.
• ROI - This is the impact to the rest of the business. A guest post isn't going to directly bring in revenue, but it is very important to the growth of the business.
• Deadline - This is another tip from Morgenstern. In the blogging business there are few deadlines. However, in this case, I really need to complete the paperwork to get the money from Tony sooner rather than later.

You'll notice I have a couple of other columns as well. I like to have a Category column to sort by. This way, if I feel like my business is in need of promotion, I can work on that. If I start seeing a number of finance tasks piling up, I can focus on those even if those other categories may technically be more important. You'll also notice a Notes column. In this case I didn't add any particular notes, but often I have notes. For example, if I had an outline of what to write for my guest post on Get Rich Slowly, I would put it here.

In Never Check E-Mail In the Morning, Morgenstern suggested that the impact to the company's revenue should be the metric for "important to the business." At the time I was reading the book, it made sense, but in applying it to my business, I started to disagree. I'm keeping it in my spreadsheet for now, but I'm thinking of combining the ROI and the Revenue into the same column like I did 10 years ago. This means tasks with big revenue impact would just have a big a ROI impact as well. One of the problems I have with the focus on revenue is that it would push necessary evils like security of my web server towards the bottom. It may not seem relevant to your revenue until there's an emergency - and that's often the worst time to deal with it.

I should also emphasize that this is my business to-do list. I've thought about shoehorning personal tasks into it, but I don't see how it would work. It seems like comparing the business impact of doing laundry can't (and shouldn't) be compared to writing blog posts. Laundry would almost always lose out unless it started to really pile up and I'm working on a more general one.

Photo Credit: Richard Dingwall

This post involves:

Productivity / Organization, To-Do

... and focuses on:

getting things done