My Simple and Effective Way to Manage a Task List

Managing tasks can be overwhelming. Without a proper system it’s easy to get lost. Here’s my simple approach to organizing tasks and priorities.

If you don’t have a task app, install Todoist. The specific app doesn’t matter much here — you can use whatever you already have.

Write down everything you need to do in the app.

Set up a priority system from 1 to 4. In Todoist this is built in. 1 is the highest priority.

Mark all tasks as the lowest priority (4) to start.

Then pick up to 100 tasks and mark them as priority 3 (if you have fewer than 100, great ;) ).

From those 100, pick 20 tasks and mark them as priority 2.

From those 20, pick 4 tasks and mark them as priority 1.

From those 4 tasks, add a due date of today to one of them.

Do the tasks scheduled for today (besides that one selected task, you’ll likely have recurring daily tasks added to the app).

When you’ve finished everything scheduled for today, pick the next task from the priority 1 list and schedule it for today.

Once all P1 tasks are done, pick another 4 from the priority 2 tasks and mark them as P1.

In short, this is the Pareto principle applied twice (you’re regularly looking for the 20% of tasks that deliver the most impact).

To view tasks at a given priority in Todoist, use filters.

Every week, MAKE SURE to do a full review and check whether priorities need to be adjusted.

Done.