Every day, you have decisions to make. Which tasks are going to get your time, attention, and energy today? With the limited resource that is you today—which tasks get a piece of you? How big a piece of you do they get?
Answering this question is not something that should be done too quickly. Otherwise, you have a to-do list full of things you’re not going to do. You’ll procrastinate. You’ll welcome distractions. You’ll end the day being unproductive.
I’ve found that there are 4 categories of tasks. Deciding which to put on your list each day comes down to paying more attention to some, but not others.
Push Tasks
Push tasks are the ones that you won’t do automatically. They’re not habits—though they may be things you want to become habits eventually. They may be difficult things, things not well-defined yet, or scary things. They’re the things that pretty much have to be on your list right in front of you in order to get done. And even then you may still avoid them.
Either way, push tasks are the types of things that need to be on your list to get done. They’re the reason why to-do lists exist.
Pull Tasks
A pull item is one that either happens due to habit, or takes little effort or motivation for you to do. Meeting with someone when the meeting is already on your calendar—that’s a pull item, and not worth putting on a to-do list. The exception would be when you’re notoriously bad about making meetings—in which case, put it on the card to motivate you to finally follow through!
Goal-Serving Tasks
This is pretty self-explanatory. Tasks that move you closer to a goal of yours are goal-serving tasks. These kinds of tasks should be prioritized. But be careful; we can often call things goals that aren’t.
A goal is simply an outcome that you desire. But many times, we desire an outcome only because someone else desires it, and tells us we need to work on making it happen. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you deem that person’s desire as important—i.e., serving a larger goal of yours. This is no easy task; and it shouldn’t be. Your goals are among the most sacred things you can keep track of.
All that aside, your task list should contain items that mostly serve your goals. And the goal-serving tasks should be prioritized.
Non Goal-Serving Tasks
We all have these on our lists. There are items that we can’t get out of having to do that don’t directly serve any big goals of ours. If you’re willing to put in the intellectual work, you might be able to trace a very circuitous route from any task to one of your goals. But save yourself the pain and simply ask yourself: can I trace a quick and direct route between this task and one of my larger goals?
If the answer is no, it’s a non goal-serving task! Try like hell not to do it.
That doesn’t mean flake on a commitment (you probably shouldn’t have committed to it in the first place). It just means that it should be deprioritized appropriately, delegated, or renegotiated. Those art forms alone are deserving of their own blog posts.