275: How to Organize Your To-Do List

Extraordinary is a choice. Take that in, soak it up because the hustle, grind, repeat mantra that society’s been touting for decades, it added all wrong. I’m Tanya Dalton. I’m a seven figure entrepreneur, bestselling author, speaker, mom, and rule breaker. I’m here to help you live to your fullest potential. That’s what this podcast is all about.

The Intentional Advantage is doing life on our own terms, defying the status quo, and seeing ourselves outside of the tidy definitions societies make for us, it’s intentionally choosing to step back away from the chaotic rush of your every days and choosing, choosing to see that it’s your world and it’s filled with opportunities. Let’s challenge the bedrock beliefs that so many have wholeheartedly trusted because we were told they were truths.

Let’s have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Let’s choose to be extraordinary. Hello, Hello everyone and welcome to the Intentional Advantage podcast. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 275. This season we’re talking about purposeful productivity. Productivity is not about doing more, it’s doing what’s most important. And you may have noticed that we had an episode…episode 273 in this season where we talked about starting with the end in mind, even if you don’t know what the end looks like, which is definitely a big stumbling block for a lot of people. It’s really important though, to be clear on where you want to go. But then I followed up that with our last episode, episode 274, with letting go of the perfect plan.

Hmm. So here I am telling you you need to plan with the end in mind, but you gotta let go of the perfect plan. Does it seem like a contradiction? It’s really not because plans are going to fall apart. Yep. They absolutely are. They’re going to fall apart from time to time and we fixate on this idea of perfection. And when we don’t achieve it, we get really frustrated. But here’s the thing, if you have a vision of what you want, if you have an idea of where you want to go, it’s so much easier to stay focused and keep moving forward. Even as plans shift and evolve, even as you shift and evolve. Cuz that happens too. That idea of vision and creating those strong plans, that’s really our focus for today. 

We’re going to be tackling how to organize your to-do list. That’s a big one. I know it is because everybody has got a to-do list. Everybody has a to-do list. We like to hold up our to-do list and show everybody how long it is to show you that Oh yeah, I’m super productive. Right? But here’s the thing.

Your to-do list takes you everywhere. But where you actually want to go, to be honest with you, your to-do list, well that’s what’s responsible for that feeling. You get at the end of the day, you know that feeling where you haven’t done enough, where you have done like 5 million things off that to-do list. You have checked things off left and right, slipping into bed at night and thinking, Ah, why haven’t I gotten more done? Ah, I’m the worst. Here’s the thing that thinking: Ah, I haven’t done enough. Or why am I the worst? I just can’t get things done. That’s why I love what I do because those are the phrases that get me fired up because I want you to go to bed at night and feel on fire.

I want you to go to bed at night and think, Ah, today was amazing. I am amazing. That’s what we want to do. And your to-do list, it’s not cutting it for you. It’s not making it happen. I mean, the truth is, our to-do lists are long. We cram like 38 hours of tasks and appointments and errands into our 24 hour day.

I mean, right, 24 hours who has time to sleep? We just need to check shit off that list, right? But here’s the thing. What’s happened is we have fallen victim to the false mindset that the busier we are, the more productive we are. Busy doesn’t mean productive busy just means you’re chasing your tail, wearing yourself out, falling into bed at night thinking you haven’t gotten enough done.

And this is the problem. Hey, and I’ve gotten, I, I have fallen prey to it myself. We get caught up in the DOING–looking for validation and what we accomplish. Tying our self worth to how much we’ve done. Been there, done that hand is raised right now. Have you ever done that? Yeah, we do that. We look around and we think everybody else has it together.

We think everybody else is doing all these incredible things. We should just do more. You’re stuck in a cycle of seeking, always looking outside of ourselves, feeling like we are lacking, that there must be something wrong with us because everybody else has it together. And that’s not true. We don’t find our value or our worth through doing. You find your value and your worth by being you,by showing up, by being authentically yourself, by doing the work that really matters to you. You actually serve better when you see your own intrinsic value, you really do. And so that’s really what I love about talking about productivity is that it’s heart. It’s really this idea of Intentional living. It’s being mindful, it’s being true to who you are and your priorities.

Which is why I’m so excited about today’s episode because I think there’s no place bigger that I see people struggling than with prioritizing. There’s this great quote that I saw the other night. I was watching the Rings of Power, which is like the prequel to Lord of the Rings because I’m totally like a nerd, which you guys know cause I’m always quoting like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

But there was this great quote that Galdrielsaid, “You cannot quench thirst by drinking sea water.” 

And I think that’s what we’re doing a lot of times with our days… we’re drinking sea water, we’re drinking all these things. We’re taking in all these things that don’t really belong to us,

that aren’t quenching our thirst. That’s why we fall into bed at night and feel exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, really just mad at ourselves that we haven’t done enough. And a lot of that is because we do tie a lot of that value to the quantity. How many things did I get done? 

Things. 

How many things were caught up in the quantity,not the quality. And here’s one of the things that I talk to people when I’m on a podcast, I’m doing interviews and they ask me about prioritizing. I always say, Okay, I want you to think about taking 50 steps in 50 different directions. So you start moving and 50 50 steps forward and backwards and sideways and diagonal and maybe back into the, to the left and forward into the right. Where are you going to end up after you take those 50 steps? I mean, who knows? Maybe in the same spot, maybe further behind from where you started. But if, instead, I said take five steps, just five, five Intentional steps forward. They don’t even have to be big steps. But if you take those five steps forward, where are you going to end up? Closer to where you want to go.

The 50 sounds amazing. It sounds so good to say I did 50 things on my list today. But if it’s not taken anywhere you want to go, what’s the point? You know, we hide behind that long list. We shine up that badge of busy because it looks really good. And then we wonder why we feel so bad about ourselves when our head hits the pillow.

It’s because we fill our days with things that don’t really matter so much sea water and that sea water’s not quenching our thirst. So let’s dive into this idea because this is something we certainly talk a lot about, but I really wanted this episode to hone in on this idea and really get you taking action. You know in my books, the Joy of Missing Out & On Purpose, both, I talk about Pareto Principle. In my podcast we’ve talked about Pareto Principle a little bit, maybe two or 3 million times now. 

But let me remind you of Pareto principle because I think it really ties into this idea of focusing in on what matters most. Pareto’s principle tells us that it’s the vital few that make the biggest impact. And this is true in all areas of life, not just your to-do list. And a lot of people like to refer to Pareto principle as the 80/20 rule. I don’t like to call it the 80/20 rule because it’s not always 80% and 20%. You’ll hear things like 20% of your clients bring you 80% of your revenue, 20% of your team does 80% of the work, 20% of your carpet gets 80% of the wear.

And that is true. There’s a vital few that really make the biggest impact. But it’s not always that perfect 80/20 split. Boy, we like perfect, don’t we? And it adds up to a hundred. It’s beautiful, but it’s not always 80/20. And it’s really this idea of focusing in on the few, the five over the 50,right? 

When we’re talking about those steps, I actually have an article and I’ll link it in the show notes that I wrote. I wrote an article for Entrepreneur Magazine a while back called Forget the 80/20 Rule: How to Design Your Own Ratio for Success. Because it really is about designing a ratio that works for you. It’s not necessarily 80/20. 

But what I want you to think about for the purpose of today’s show is focusing in on the vital few,

on the five steps. I know five steps doesn’t seem like much, but that’s why we’re chasing busy because we’re not focusing on the five steps, the vital few. We’re filling our day with the trivial many, all of that sea water. I want your day to feel simple. I want it to feel easy. I think we forget that we can have light and easy.

We falsely believe that if we aren’t busy, we are failing. Have you ever had that moment in your day where there’s like five minutes you’ve gotten the things done that need to happen and you have five minutes before the next thing starts and you feel okay? Little bit unsettled, like, okay, this can’t be right. I shouldn’t have five minutes to myself.

Right? That’s because society pushes this idea on us that we must constantly be moving the hustle culture. It’s real and it’s permeated the way that we feel, the way that we think, the way that we act. But here’s the thing, prioritizing is incredibly simple and it does make your day feel so much easier. We have this tendency to overcomplicate things.

And so I want to make this really simple because we do, we like to make things really complicated, but when things are simple, it’s so much more actionable, right? I mean, one of the most watched Ted talks out there is the one on how to use one paper towel to dry your hands, which is a great watch. I highly recommend it.

I’ll put a link in the show notes. But it shows how you use one paper towel. There are literally two steps to using a single paper towel every time you dry your hands. And it’s so simple. I’ve been using that saving, I don’t know how many paper towels. So let’s stop complicating things. Let’s stop overthinking things. This is what happens with our to-do list.

This is why our to-do lists aren’t working because they’re overly complicated. Your to-do list. It’s not making you more productive, it’s sabotaging your success because it’s complicated. It’s a jumble of tasks. Some of them are important, some of them are not important. Some take a few minutes, some take several hours or a couple of days. And what happens is we look at that jumbled list of tasks and we get,

Oh my gosh, I don’t even know where to start, Right? So you know what our brain does? It goes, I gotcha, I got you covered. Let’s go for the easiest win. Let’s check something off that list. And you’re like, Yep, let’s do it. You know why? We get a little hit of dopamine and it feels so good.

This is why we love to cross things off our to-do list. Or we add things after we’ve done them to cross them off. Shh, I won’t tell. But we’ve all done it. It feels good. It feels fabulous to cross things off your list. But if your list is supposed to make you more productive, that boost in dopamine, it’s short lived.

It’s not really making you productive. And what ends up happening is your brain is so busy, like going for those, that low hanging fruit, going for those easy tasks to cross off that the big important work, the tasks that really matter, the ones that are going to take a little longer and are truly important, they keep getting pushed to the end of that list.

So we’ll spend hours crossing off the simple tasks that we can do really fast, like responding to emails instead of working on the passion project or the work that will move us forward, or the goals or the big dream that we have when high and low priority tasks are all mixed together. It is so hard to know what to work on in the moment.

So let’s fix that. Let’s make this easy. After all you have heard me say time and time again, overwhelm isn’t having too much to do. It’s not knowing where to start. So let me give you a place to start. Let’s start with the end. See what I did there? Brought it all around. I like to close a loop.

That’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to talk in just a minute about a strategy to figure out what’s important. But let’s start with this. What do you want? Isn’t that the big question? What do you want? When I’m planning my day, I start by thinking about what do I want at the end of the day emotionally? I’m not thinking about tasks and projects and those things I’m tapped in on.

What emotion do I want to experience? At the end of the day, you’ll remember we talked about the six pillars. Emotional is one of them. We need to take care of the whole you all six of of those pillars, right? How do I want to feel at the end of the day? Ask yourself that question. Now, here’s the trick.

Can’t be the same word every day. Cannot be, I want to feel successful, want to feel successful. And here’s the other, here’s the other big rule. It can’t be the word good. I talked about my utter hatred. Hatred for the word good in an email a few weeks ago. But good tells me nothing successful tells me nothing. Hone in and really get a lot of clarity on what it is you want to feel at the end of the day.

So let’s say, let’s say Kay has something at school, at the end of the day, like we’re we have an event at her school to go to, Okay, how do I want to feel? I want to feel present. That’s how I want to feel. I want to feel like work is close behind me and now I’m really focused in on her and what she is there to do, right? Or if I have a big project or big presentation coming up, maybe my emotion at the end of the day is I want to feel prepared. I want to feel prepared. So I feel really confident. Maybe confident is the word that you want to feel at the end of the day or the emotion you want to experience. What do you want to feel? Because that gives me clarity.

If I want to be present for K’s activity at school that night, what are the things I need to get done so I feel present so I can get them out of my head so I can really give her a hundred percent of my focus, which she deserves. Or if I want to feel prepared for that presentation, that gives me so much clarity on what it is I need to accomplish to get that feeling of being prepared.

Do you see how that works? Tying in, tapping into the emotions is incredibly powerful. And then when I go to bed at night, you know how I feel? Not unsuccessful, not unsatisfied or frustrated. I feel present, or I feel prepared, or I feel confident, or whatever emotion I made that decision about earlier in the day, that’s really powerful.

Use that as your guide to help tell you where you want your day to take you. And when you give yourself that destination, you can start prioritizing. See how that works, Starting with the end in mind, right? All right, I’m going to come back in just a minute. We’re going to take a quick knit episode break, and when I come back,we’re going to get clear on how you can figure out what’s most important and we’ll do a priority list walkthrough. 

In today’s episode, we’re talking about prioritizing what is most important, and there’s no better way to really prioritize and to help you feel successful at the end of the day than to plan out that day, which is why I am so proud to be the founder of inkwell Press Productivity Co.

Because it is all about having the tools to be able to make all of this happen. That’s really what I love. I love talking to you here on the podcast and then saying, By the way, if you’re ready to get started, you can go pick up a planner and it’s all laid out for you. You, the priority list that we’re going to talk about here in a few minutes,

it’s laid out for you in the daily planner that we offer on inkwellpress.com. Getting the tools allows you to really feel confident in moving forward. And that’s really what I’m here for. So you can head over to ink press.com to take a look at the planners there, or amazing, incredible announcement here. Are you ready? You can also pick up planners at Staples.

I have a beautiful collection of planners at Staples. The inkwell Press Staples collection really is, well, it’s gorgeous. I’m so proud of it. And I’m really proud to offer some bound planners. We have disk planners on the inkwell press.com site, but if you are looking for a bound planner, I have, I think it’s like six different sizes of inkWELL press planners at Staples, as well as a big desk pad and wall calendars. So you can head to your local Staples store or go to inkwellpress.com, and I have links to all of it there as well. 

Okay, For the second part of the show, I really want to dive into how you prioritize your to-do list, or rather how you create a priority list. And we need to start by really understanding the difference between important and urgent,because I think so often we confuse the two. Just because something is urgent doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important, but a lot of times we treat it that way. So urgent tasks, that’s a big one a lot of times on our to-do list, and we want to tackle those first because they’re urgent. They’re a fire that has to be put out. It’s pinging or beeping at you, right? And it’s causing you discomfort. 

So a lot of times we prioritize things simply because they’re urgent. Here’s the truth. Urgent tasks are only tied to time. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important. Urgent tasks are just like, yep, need to take care of these quickly, right? Important tasks. On the other hand, important tasks are the work that really will move you forward in life.

Getting you to that big, bright, beautiful future that you dream about, helping you accomplish your goals, getting you to feel good at the end of the day. Important items. Those are the five steps versus the 50 like we talked about earlier. So a lot of times people say, Well, how do I know what’s important? Can you give me a list?

And I can’t give you a list, but I can give you a strategy. So let me do that for you. I can’t give you a list because everybody’s list is different, right? Your list is going to be different than my list because we have different priorities, and that’s a great thing. So let me share with you, this is a, I’m going to go over it really quickly, but this is something we go much more in depth into in the Joy of Missing Out. So if you have The Joy of Missing Out, I definitely encourage you picking it up and kind of revisiting that chapter. I believe it’s chapter six in the Joy of Missing Out. But let’s go through it really quickly because what we do is we use the word clear to get clear on what’s important.

So let me walk you through that. Clear stands for C connected to our north star, our mission, our vision, our core values, L linked to a goal E, Essential, it must be done by you. Nobody else can do this. A – advantageous and R – reality based. This is not perfectionism rearing its ugly head. This is really something that is truly going to drive us forward.

So what you do is you ask yourself those five questions, Is it connected to my North star? Is it linked to a goal? Is it essential? Is it advantageous? Is it reality based? And each time the answer is yes. You hold up a finger. Now if you have 3, 4, 5 fingers held up, yeah, it’s probably something that’s really important.

If you only have one or two fingers held up or zero, we get really clear right away that it’s not important. So I want to make sure, and again, you can go more in depth with this in chapter six of the Joy of Missing Out. But asking yourself those questions really will allow you to see is it important or is it simply just something that’s urgent that’s on your list.

Understanding and taking the time to differentiate urgent from important is really going to make a big difference, and it’s going to help you as we’re making our priority list. Okay, So I told you this is going to be easy, right? All you have to do is hold up your hand, hold up a finger each time you answer yes to the word. 

Clear, simple, easy, right? 

I told you, let’s keep it easy. Let’s start talking about the priority list. Because what I want you to do is I want you to take that all todo list you’ve been using and we’re going to toss it out the window. All right? You don’t really have to toss it out the window. We can use it as our well to draw out of.

But what we want to do is we want to start by creating a priority list. And a priority list is like a todo list that is organized. That’s what I like to tell people. So all those skills you’ve picked up in all those years of making to-do list, we’re going to apply them right now into creating a priority list. It’s super simple. 

What I love about a priority list is it takes the same amount of time,same amount of effort as a to-do list is just a to-do list with intention. All right, Let’s talk about where we’re going to start. So earlier in the show, I said my phrase that I say all the time, overwhelm isn’t having too much to do. It’s not knowing where to start. What a priority list does is it tells you where to start.

We’re going to start at the top with the top level of priorities, and that level is called escalate. These are items that are important. Remember, they’re connected to our North star, linked to a goal, essential, advantageous, reality based. So they’re important and they’re also urgent. So they also are this like fire that’s going off. It’s a time sensitive task that also moves you closer to your goals, or it’s essential or it’s advantageous. It’s an investment in yourself. So these could be things like signing up for a class right before the enrollment deadline or working on a project that is due the next day. Or it could be, you know, getting your product listings up before an upcoming launch on your website. It could be getting your car fixed when it breaks down,right? 

Because that’s important. It helps us get to work and do the things that we need to do, but it’s also very urgent needs to get taken care of right away. 

You want to start your day here because then we’re getting important work done and we’re also getting those urgent fires taken care of. But here’s the thing that I want you to keep in mind.

We don’t want to always have a lot of things in this top section of our priority list. We don’t want to have a lot of tasks that are important and urgent. We don’t want to spend the majority of our time here because when you’re in urgent mode, you’re really in a reactionary state, You’re not really being proactive. You’re not able to do work to its highest and best quality, which is what we want for our important tasks. That leads me to the second section of the priority list, which is cultivate. Now, if you look at my priority list that I have on equal press.com, or you know, on the daily planner, you’ll notice that this section of the priority list is the biggest. This is for tasks or projects that are important but not urgent.

Mmm. So these are not the urgent fires. These are the tasks that don’t have a looming deadline. Or maybe they have a far off deadline, but they are going to move you closer towards your mission, your vision, your core values, they’re essential, they’re advantageous, they’re they’re linked to your goals, right? But here’s the thing, because they’re not urgent,a lot of times they get pushed aside. I’ll deal with that later, right? What we want to do is we want to put these items high on our list, we pay, place them under escalate, cuz we take care of the escalate task first, which are important and urgent. Then we can tackle the tasks that are not urgent, but are still important, right? 

What that does is it allows you to really put your best self into the work you’re creating. Being in a situation without that urgent feeling allows you to not be reactionary, but proactive in your work. It allows you to give yourself the time you need to think and be creative with your solutions. You’re not in panic mode. So you can often really dive deeper and do your best work.

And a lot of times these things are things like, well, there’s really two kinds. There’s two kinds of cultivate tasks. There’s habits maybe that we’re wanting to set. Maybe there’s something that you really feel is important or it is long term projects, long term things that we really want to do. It might be things like, you know, taking a course or a program.

I always, in my cultivate section of my priority list, I’m always taking a program or reading a new book or doing something that will really benefit me and help me in my work. So it might be things like working on a project that’s not due for several weeks, because then you’re really able to come up up with creative solutions, right? That’s what I want you to spend your time doing is really in this cultivate area.

And when we spend more time on tasks that are important but not urgent, the little side bonus, and it’s not so little, to be honest with you, it’s huge. Those tasks never become urgent because they get taken care of. That project that you have, that’s three weeks down the road, it gets taken care of before it becomes an urgent fire.

Which means you feel more confident, you feel more excited about it because you’ve done your best work and you’re not scrambling to try to get it done. So that’s our second section. We started the top with escalate. Our second section is cultivate, which is where we want to spend the majority of our day. And then we get to our third section, which is accommodate.

Now I very intentionally called, called this section accommodate because we’re not wanting to spend the majority of our day here. We’re not revolving our day around these tasks. These are things that get accommodated throughout our day. So you know, if we have a few minutes we work on them, then here’s what these tasks look like. These are tasks that are urgent, so they feel like an urgent fire or like a ringing alarm going off, but they’re not really important. A lot of times these are other people’s priorities or the things we’ve said yes to that we really don’t want to do. 

Essentially these are tasks that are pulling us out of our zone of genius, out of the work that we know that we’re here to do, that let us go to bed at night and feel amazing. It’s pulling us out of those things and it’s causing us to chase our tail. And I’ll tell you the biggest, biggest task that goes under this section of accommodate is email, right? The inbox that never stops filling up and never seems to be finished out. Your inbox fits there. And any of those tasks that you know are busy work, we know what busy work is, it’s not really filling our day, it’s that’s the sea water in our day, right? But here’s the thing, we tend to fill this up because it feels urgent. I gotta go get the dry cleaning right now. And so we spend 30 minutes driving across town to pick up the dry cleaning instead of really working on the work that matters.

Or instead of delegating this to somebody else or asking somebody else to stop by and picking up the dry cleaning or getting the dry cleaning delivered, right? So I would challenge you with this accommodate section, Think about how you can delete these tasks or delegate them. A lot of household tasks fit here. As I mentioned, a lot of the emails in your inbox are really accommodate tasks and those things you’ve said yes to for other people.

So let’s be a little more mindful. And it is, it is a mindset shift to bump these things down to this accommodate section. But when we start doing that, when we start putting fewer things on that priority list, and when we really focus in and start our day with that escalate, then move to cultivate, and then we accommodate the accommodate section, right? 

That’s when we go to bed at night and we feel amazing. Because the truth is those, those tasks that aren’t really important, they’re, they eat up our day, they eat up our time, and they leave us exhausted. So that is a really quick walkthrough of the priority list. I am actually going to be shooting a video for TanyaTV.

I’m bringing that back. I’m going to shoot a video for TanyaTV so you can see how all of this looks visually. I’m going to walk you through it. I’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m going to send that out next week because I want to have time to shoot that. But I’ll put that in the show notes. You can always go to Tanya dalton.com/youtube.

I have so many videos there that will help you. All kinds of things from how to stop procrastinating to setting habits to, well, you know, it runs the gamut, but I will have this video up and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that as well. As I mentioned, I’ll also send that out to my email list next week so that you guys can make sure to give that a watch because I think that’ll help you even more.

And if you want to revisit more and go more in depth, you can always read The Joy of Missing Out. Chapter six is where we go really in depth with the priority list and even that clear framework that we talked about earlier. All right, so there we have it. This is how we can organize our to-do list by throwing out the to-do list.

You didn’t expect that one, right? We organize our to-do list by throwing out our to do list and creating a priority list instead. Now, if you felt like today’s show helped you, I would love for you to leave a review, share it with a friend, plan to watch that TanyaTV video. Take it the next step. Because here’s the thing…I want you to be accountable. I want you to start really moving forward. I want you to go to bed at night and I do want you to say, Today felt amazing. I am amazing. When we start doing that, that’s when everything shifts. Everything changes for us. 

And the truth is, when we choose to prioritize, when we choose to do work that truly matters, that’s when we know we’ve got the Intentional Advantage.

Thanks so much for joining me today. Quick question though, before you go, Do you like prizes? When you leave a rating and review of the Intentional Advantage podcast, you’ll be entered to win my life changing course, multiplying your time. Simply leave the review and then send me an email at hello at Tanya dalton.com with a screenshot. I choose one winner at the end of every month. So go ahead, do it right now. Just a quick comment with what you loved about this episode or the show in general, and a rating and send it our way. Not going to lie by stars is my favorite, but I’d love to hear what you think of the show and if that’s not enough of an incentive for you to win the Multiplying Your Time course,

I have to tell you, reviews are the number one thing that supports this podcast and me. It’s the best way to spread the word and get business tips and strategies to all those other women out there who need it. So there you go. Two great reasons for you to go and leave a review right now. So go ahead and do it. Send that screenshot my way because I want to give you a free course.

And thanks again for listening today. I’ll be back next Tuesday and I’ll plan to see you then.

 

** The Intentional Advantage is one of the best productivity podcasts for women looking to be more productive and increase their time management. This episode’s transcript is created by AI, so please excuse any typos, misspellings and grammar mistakes.

 

Tanya Dalton is a female motivational speaker, her keynote topics on productivity, time management, habits, purpose and balance resonate with women around the world. As a woman productivity expert she is able to speak from a different point-of-view about to work more effectively while having a thriving personal life.