Productivity Tips – List-Followers and Creating your own Printable To-Do Daily Task List

Posted by J.J. under GTD, Productivity, Shortcuts | Be the First to Comment

One relative of mine is a working mom and she have to wake up early around 5.00 a.m. to prepare breakfast for his husband and two kids, before sending her kids to school. She has no difference than other working women as she has to time-in punctually at 9 a.m. and works eight hours per day.

I don’t have to mention about doing house chores – she does all the house chores as hiring a maid is extremely costly due to her tight financial budget. I’m sure that she’s not the only unsung ‘heroine’ in the world; there are plenty of working women and housewives who are very good at multitasking when compared with men.

Please fast-forward the clip to 14:16. Sir Ken Robinson praises her wife for being good multitasker.

What makes them able to multitask? I can indiscriminately saying that women are ‘list-followers’.

What are actually meant by ‘list-followers’?

Unlike men, working women perform tasks more efficiently based on given or prepared task lists. These ‘list-followers’ have these common characteristics:

• These ‘list-followers’ are very good at technical work as they possess distinctive skills like managing accounts, auditing, taxation, IT system support and clerical work.
• Very few of them involved in decision-making and strategic thinking tasks
• They are very agile – as they possess good typing and calculating skills and fast reading.

For those who have spent too much time on one task, being a ‘list-follower’ won’t slow you down because there are some tasks doesn’t requires much planning and thinking – i.e. filing documents and sorting files and folders in your computer, sending ‘thank you’ note and etc. I had worked as a temporary general clerk in a small-sized legal firm for few days. On the first day, it was almost disastrous – due to its fast-paced working environment and heaps of work.

My daily task was simple as I was required to modify contacts and addresses on the legal document templates and then I would print it out, photocopy and sort it out before sending it to their respectively clients. I was totally messed out by several things:

• I used the photocopy machine and the paper was jammed in the machine
• Making typo on legal documents because I’m not a good typist
• Problems with sorting documents.

Bottom line is – if you handle simply tasks without a proper system, you’ll be soon ended up into complete failure!

Let’s us get back to the topic. She has to list out 20 different meals for breakfast to ensure that there not repetition within a week. It is a fixed routine and it will take less time to achieve by creating a daily task sheet. If you’re relying on your Blackberry or any other gadgets to store your daily task list – it’s like using a spoon to eat a bowl of spaghetti. Better stick to the basic method – the pen and paper technique.

In fact, you don’t have to create your own daily task sheet as you can download several types of printable to-do lists to get yourself organized.

• Download free printable to-do lists for organizing your trip, groceries, wine inventory, room – it is more on personal management lists. Click here.
• If you prefer creating your own list – for instance, putting your own title on the top of the list, creating different size of the to-do sheet. Click here.
• To-Do Today Sheet sample from my previous post about Pomodoro Technique – the timeboxing technique.

Related posts:

1. 12 Tips to Manage Your Time Better
2. Tools to Improve Productivity for Preparing for Your PowerPoint Presentations

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