So, how do you go about your day? How do you decide what to do and when? What dictates how you get from your morning coffee to your afternoon tipple? If you’re like me, you have a daily list of things you work through to help you reach your goals and meet your commitments. But not just any list - I have a daily action sheet, and giving other women’s to do lists a glow up is one of my favourite ways to transform their working lives.

The women I work with have busy lives and juggle many competing priorities. Often the one thing that keeps them up at night is that anxiety about how to stay on top of everything. One of the first things I ask a woman who is overwhelmed is exactly that question - how do you stay on top of everything that’s needed to be done today, this week, this month, this quarter and this year? The answer varies from a pile of sticky notes, through to a wing and a prayer, across to spreadsheets of multiple pages. What they have in common, however, is the magnitude of all the bits and bobs they’re undertaking. Some clients have incredibly extensive to do lists and the very thought of them makes me twitchy. In a million years they’d never be able to cross off everything on their list, let alone the typical working week.

I’ve had a lot of experience in the world of productivity. If there’s a productivity approach out there, I’ve experimented with it! Over the years as a project manager, owner of a thriving catering and food biz, an entrepreneur and now as a coach balancing two brands, working with clients and responding to the whims of two cheeky pusses, I’ve trialled all sorts of tools to help me get the most out of my days. Needless to say, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the perplexing when it comes to getting things done. I’ve experienced the power of a great to do list as well as the impact of a shoddy one. It’s this experience the led me to create my aforementioned daily action list. Out of all of the tips, tools, tricks and resources I share with my coaching client it’s this daily action sheet that makes women’s eyes light up, every time. Why? Well, we all want to get more done in the limited time we have, but not just any ‘thing’ but those tasks that matter, that drive momentum and ultimately success.

Let’s have a quick overview of some of the tools I’ve personally used or have seen clients use to keep on top of everything.

A cloud-based task management system: These are actually pretty darn good for productivity and organisation. Asana is one of the market leaders and for good reason. It allows for a big brain dump and then a sort of all the different things to do - and you can add a deadline to ground the task. You can drag and drop items according to their priority and invite people to your boards so you can have accountability. I have clients who plot their quarterly goals in Asana and give me viewing access so I know where focus *should* be as we move through coaching. It’s also easy to assign the tasks to people like VAs or OBMs. There’s not too much of a learning curve for Asana and it can be used as easily as a KANBAN type tool with categories for ‘to do’, ‘currently doing’ and ‘done.’ You can sort items according to function - for example one of my clients has separate ‘teams’ for her Operations, Marketing, Delivery and Services and every ‘to do’ is dragged and dropped into the relevant team. A cloud-based system like Asana is the perfect reference tool for your daily action list - at a glance you can see your priorities and then that can then dictate how you want to spend your day.

A calendar: I know some people love to use their calendar as a to do list. They allocate specific days and times against tasks and schedule them in. This can help you prioritise and obviously has deadlines but it also relies on minimal disruptions or interruptions - ha! Here’s what I don’t like - we all know that time expands and contracts - you know that feeling of flow state where time races? I assume you know also how time drags when you’re doing something you really aren’t that interested in but know is necessary. There’s also research that suggests we overestimate how much we can do in a day. There’s a reason many productivity experts recommend against it. That said, if you like having timings attached to your list, a calendar can work with your daily action list by forcing you to prioritise how you spend your time and on what tasks, as you’ll see in painful detail how much time you actually have to achieve your goals for the day.

A running or master list: There’s more than a handful of women I’ve coached who have a running to do list that goes for pages upon pages. It’s a dumping ground for all the thoughts and reminders that pop into their heads. What I don’t like about a running list is the sheer volume of it. Nothing is prioritised, the scale of it can feel like it’s all too overwhelming. You stay in busy work that’s easy to tick off for that dopamine hit, but the needle never really shifts in your business. However, if you love a running list, you can give your daily action sheet a glow up by using it to inform how you spend the day and pick tasks off it that you know you can get ticked off.

The Eisenhower Matrix: This is a to do list that works on the concept of importance and urgency. Imagine a box with four quadrants:

• Important and urgent - do it now

• Important and non-urgent - schedule it for later

• Not important and urgent - handball or delegate it

• Not important and non-urgent - delete, delete, delete!

When you apply the Eisenhower Matrix to my daily action sheet you can start to see some real momentum in your business as well as ticking off some of the day-to-day stuff that we all face. You can allocate time in your day to do what’s important against your goals and you don’t lose sight of the important but non-urgent because your item against them is to specifically schedule them for a later date. Of course, the trick there is making sure when that time comes around you actually commit, but that’s a post for another day!

So what do you think? Are you ready to give your daily to do list a glow up? You don’t have to do this alone - I’m here to help!

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