Winning Your Day: How to Increase Your Productivity and Reduce Stress by Creating a Daily Tasklist

One of the most effective things you can do to boost your productivity is to write every morning a list of tasks to be done. However, many people are doing it the wrong way and therefore do not experience the benefits of it.

Below we will show the benefits of creating a daily tasklist as well as the best way to do it and therefore reap the most benefits.

1. Benefits of Creating a Daily Tasklist

There are enormous benefits in having a daily tasklist.

1.1. More clarity

You likely feel that you are overloaded with responsibility. But when you are asked about what the five most important tasks are that you should be doing right now, you likely will not be able to give an immediate answer; at least you will have to take some time to think about it.

This is because we have too many things in our head and have to constantly think about what the next most important task is. So we lack clarity.

1.2. Less stress

The lack of clarity that most of us experience leads to stress. This is because on the one hand we know we have to do a lot of tasks, on the other hand we are never sure what exactly we have to get done right now, and subconsciously always worry that we are not doing the tasks we should be doing.

Therefore, as we gain clarity this stress is reduced.

1.3. More focus & less distraction

Once you have clarity on what to do and when to do it, you no longer have to think what to do next. Instead you just focus on the execution of your tasks.

But if you have uncertainty on what to do next, you allow yourself to get sucked into unimportant work or even worse you get distracted with other things that have nothing to do with your work. This is much less likely to happen in case you know exactly what you should be working on next.

1.4. More freedom

With freedom we mean that you get to spend time off work and also that during this off-time you are able to not constantly think about work.

Unfortunately, most office workers in today’s busy business world are:

1. Constantly putting in extra hours, and therefore have less free time off work.
2. Are constantly connected to work via email and social media.
3. Even during their off time they think about work.

Having a daily tasklist, and therefore having less stress and more productivity leads you to be able to accomplish more in less time and therefore get more free time.

Moreover, it helps you to not constantly think about work. Why is that?

The reason you are not able to completely disconnect from work, is that you constantly at least subconsciously fear that there is some task or responsibility that you forgot about.

By making a daily tasklist, you know that if you have completed your tasks there is nothing else to worry about. So you get a new feeling of freedom!

1.5. Easier to delegate

When you have all your tasks written down it becomes easier to analyze which tasks you are able to delegate to somebody else.

1.6. Sense of accomplishment

An important side benefit of working with a tasklist is that you get to mark your tasks as completed and get to see the list of completed tasks. So by looking at your tasklist you not only get clear on what you will have to work on, but also what you have already accomplished.

This will give you a positive feeling and give you more motivation to complete the next task.

In view of all of the above benefits you can be sure that spending a few minutes to make a daily tasklist is a great investment of your time.

However, you might have tried it in the past and not have gotten the benefits described above. If so you most likely were doing it in the wrong way.

2. How to Create Your Daily Tasklist

In order to reap the full benefits of a daily tasklist it is important to do it in the right way. In the following we will show you how.

2.1. Do it before anything else

Many professionals write down some tasks they have to work on during their work day instead of doing it at the beginning. This only brings part of the potential benefits of a daily tasklist. A daily tasklist should be done first thing in the morning, or even the night before.

Ideally, you establish a morning routine, which might include taking a shower, having breakfast, brushing your teeth, exercising and of course building a daily tasklist.

2.2. Select tasks from the prior day

Building a daily tasklist means selecting the tasks to be done today. The first place to collect tasks for today is the daily tasklist of yesterday.

Any tasks that did not get done yesterday, should likely be done today.

Also, any follow up tasks related to a task from yesterday should be in today’s tasklist.

2.3. Select tasks from your weekly sprint

After you have selected the tasks related to yesterday’s daily tasklist you look at your weekly tasklist. Which tasks are in your weekly tasklist that you still have to complete?

In order to do this, you of course need to have created a weekly tasklist in the first place. You can learn all about the benefits of weekly tasks lists and how to create one in this article:

Winning the Week: How to Plan Your Week in 30 Minutes Flat

2.4. Split projects into tasks and subtasks

If you create tasks to your daily tasklist that are more than three hours long, you are likely talking about projects or large tasks that can be split into subtasks.

For example, creating a website is a project consisting of many subtasks such as hiring a developer, creating a wireframe, creating design ideas etc. These tasks you should split into smaller, actionable tasks.

These actionable tasks or subtasks should generally not be bigger than 30 minutes. This ensures that you know clearly what needs to be done to accomplish the task and that the task can be done within a short work session.

2.5. Combine different personal and professional projects

You likely have different projects for which you want to create a daily tasklist. For example, if you are a contractor and working with three different clients you would want to create three different tasklists, one for each client. That means that for each client you would create different backlogs, different weekly tasks lists as well as different daily tasklists.

In addition, we recommend that you create a project and tasklists for tasks to be done outside of work, such as doing your laundry, buying a present for your mother or complaining about an unknown charge on your credit card.

While it makes sense to make separate lists, you should combine the different lists to one overall daily tasklist including all daily tasks from all the different projects. This is important to gain the clarity and the reduction in stress we talked about above. In order for that to happen you need to have one single place with all your tasks for the day.

2.6. Schedule tasks before execution

After you have completed the daily tasklist for each of your projects and look at the combined daily tasklist for all the projects, you should schedule the tasks in the order of execution. Ideally you should be able to drag and drop tasks to the bottom or the top, according to the order of execution.

2.7. Constantly update your tasklist as you execute

Create the daily tasklist by:

1. Selecting all your tasks,
2. Combining the different projects tasklists to one overall daily tasklist, and then
3. Scheduling your tasks

This will give you a great structure, and motivation during the day.

However, this has almost no benefit if you do not use your tasklist to guide you in what to work on next. Therefore, as you are executing your tasks you want to keep the tasklist constantly updated.

3. Software to Help You Create a Daily Tasklist and Accomplish Your Goals

If you create your daily tasklist manually with pen and paper you will have to recreate it and manually update it every single day, and in fact every single time you complete a task. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you use a software tool to manage your tasks. However, all popular software tools such as Asana, Trello, and Jira are not made to work with the system of Focus Cycles.

For that reason we developed a work management software that adjusts perfectly to the Focus Cycles Work System. It is called Workiamo.

Workiam allows you to:

● Easily create weekly sprints and daily tasks lists

● Have all different tasklists (monthly, weekly and daily) in sync

● Move tasks between different tasklists with ease

● Combine all personal and professional sprints in just one daily tasklist

● Schedule daily tasks

Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.