Goal Setting - The Daily To Do List

Goal Setting – The Daily To Do List

Today we will be focusing on the dreaded “to do list”, and will help you get the most out of it everyday.

By now, you should know our views on goal setting. Develop 10 year goals, develop 1 year goals, develop monthly goals and develop weekly goals. This helps you to stay on track, and breaks down your larger goals, into small achievable chunks. The daily to do list is where everything happens, and your tasks become your goals.

To get the most out of your daily to-do-list, there are two mechanisms you can use.

Highlighting: Because you know what your goals are, when you write your to-do-list, highlight the most important four to five items that you want to achieve that day. Do these items first.

A lot of people focus on the easier items first, and then when other drama’s or activities come up they lose sight of what they were wanting to achieve. If you focus on the most important items first, then you should at least have these done by the end of the day.

One way to work out what is the most important, is to see which activity will make the most difference to your future in say 1 year, 2 years or 5 years time.

Place your tasks in quadrants:

There are four quadrants that tasks on your to-do-list can fall into.

Urgent and Important
Not Urgent but Important
Urgent but not important
Not urgent and not important

Out of the four, the most important quadrant is the second (not urgent but important). This is where most of your goal activities will go, so it is instrumental that you focus a lot of your time – and tasks – in this quadrant.

Write a list of all the activities and try and place them in each quadrant. This will give you an understand of where the tasks you are working on sit. Try and avoid tasks in the urgent but unimportant and not urgent and not important quadrants. Things like e-mail and chatting can waste some of your valuable time.

So that’s it. Use these two simple mechanisms and you will be able to get the most out of your daily to-do-list.

And some more views…

Today in “The Age”, one of Melbourne’s newspaper, there was an article about plastic surgery and young girls. Apparently 25 per cent of girls would like to alter part of their body. The interesting fact is that some of these girls are as young as 11.

What leads to this sort of view. The media, parenting, class rooms??? Possibly all of the above. At the end of the day it seems that there are a lot of young people out there not happy with the way they look, and possibly not happy with their lives in general – it is this part that your editor finds worrying.