Design & Achieve Your Goals with Creative Thinking
Step 10: To-Do and Don't-Do Lists
It is nearly time to get started. Hopefully your once daunting dream goal now seems less daunting and more doable. The final thing you need to do is to prepare to-do lists and don’t-do lists.
To-do lists, of course, are lists of actions you need to take in order to accomplish subgoals and eventually your goal. By breaking subgoals into to-do lists, you can make even the most daunting task manageable. Building a house may seem overwhelming. Putting pen to paper to begin designing the house, however, is manageable.
There are many approaches to to-do lists and you need to do what works best for you. I personally prefer to prepare a to-do list on a day by day basis. Normally, I write the to-do list the night before. That way, when I wake up in the morning (and after I have seen my children off to school), I know exactly what I need to do. I find that if I hit the ground running with a set of tasks, it is easy to accomplish a great deal in one day. Moreover, I can gauge how well I am doing by seeing how many tasks I have accomplished on a given day.
You can also prepare to-do lists for longer periods of time or even the entire project. However, there should be some indication of what you will do on each day.
A to-do list can be highly detailed, indicating exactly what time you will perform each task and how long it will take. Alternatively, it can be a simple check-list of actions for the day or the week. I prefer to make a daily to-do list with actions listed in terms of priority. I write this on the notepad I keep on my desk. On the same sheet as the day’s to-do list, I also keep a don’t do list.
What is a don’t-do list? It is simply a list of things that you promise yourself not to do while you are working on achieving your dream goal. It is all too easy to become distracted by unimportant tasks or to procrastinate by doing unimportant things when you should be working, things like playing games on Facebook or watching too much television. A don’t-do list is simply a list of actions you find yourself doing, but which prevent you from accomplishing your subgoals.
One of the best ways to avoid doing these things is to make a don’t do list and keep it with your to-do list. You don’t necessarily have to prohibit the actions. You can simply limit them, for instance by allowing yourself only to play on Facebook at the end of the day or allotting a set time for certain activities.
Action
Prepare your first to-do and don’t do lists for tomorrow. I suggest you give yourself some concrete tasks which you will accomplish as well as optional tasks that you can do if you finish the concrete tasks ahead of schedule. This way, if you finish your first tasks too quickly, you will have other tasks to start upon.
Then, tomorrow morning, do it! And at the end of the day tomorrow, prepare your to-do list for the next day. You can probably use the same don’t-do list. But if you find yourself wasting time on activities not on the list, do add these activities to the don’t-do list.
See how it goes. Depending on how experienced you are with self-planning, you may find that you assign yourself too much or too little to do. No worries. Modify the amount of work you give yourself on each to-do list. You’ll get the hang of it shortly.
I will publish the 12 step Designer Goals process over the next few days. Here are the steps we will do together.
- Introduction (This page!)
- Acknowledge personal responsibility.
- Define your goal or ambition.
- Question your goal.
- Reframe your goal.
- Imagine achieving your goal.
- Identify subgoals you need to take to live that dream.
- Build ideas for achieving subgoals.
- Putting it all together
- Build to-do and don’t-do lists
- Using your imagination
- Get started!
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