019 How to tame your to-do list: Using The Traffic Light Formula

Welcome to the Time Management Podcast with me, your host, Abigail Barnes. I'm a productivity coach, global speaker, time management author, and award-winning entrepreneur on a mission to share the 888 formula with the world and to remind you that it's your time.

Leave it to me to bring you new time management tips, tricks, tools, and strategies to introduce you to guests, research, and case studies from around the world and to give you a simple five-step process you can follow to up-level your productivity, achieve your goals and create a life that exceeds your wildest dreams. I'm so excited that you're here, so let's get started. Welcome to the show. It's you and me today for a conversation all about how to tame your to-do list.

This episode is for you if your to-do list looks more like a shopping list, if you're overwhelmed by everything that you need to get done right now, if you're finding yourself easily distracted. Procrastinating, doing that busy work aka the things that are not moving the needle are not important, and then you are burning out all of your energy and your ability to get done what needs to get done.

If that's you, have no fear. This episode is going to give you a practical, actionable strategy that you can use straight away. This strategy comes from over 10 years in in investment management, asset management, hedge funds, in the marketing departments, my corporate career, as well as over 10 years of running a business. So it was something that I started to do at the very beginning. I learned and then have evolved and evolved and evolved and now teach to my clients.

Let's dive straight into it. For this activity, you are going to need a piece of paper and on this piece of paper you are going to write your entire to-do list. This is everything that's on your mind right now and this list is going to include the things like make the appointment, pay the bill, buy the milk, send the card. By that I mean all those things that are on your mind. So on this piece of paper just write it all down. The work, the life, write everything down.

Then once you have done this you are going to need three highlighter pens. For this you are going to need a green highlighter pen, you are going to need an orange highlighter pen. And you are going to need a pink highlighter pen. If you can't get any of these colors, replace them with the closest colors you find. Now, this to-do list needs to be organized using the traffic light formula.

So, the green highlighter pen, look through the to-do list and highlight all of the activities that need to be done ASAP and need to be done by you. With the orange highlighter pen, if you can't find orange, yellow will do, highlight the activities that need to be done, don't necessarily need to be done today and don't necessarily need need to be done by you. And then finally, your pink highlighter pen.

These are activities that don't need to be done today and don't necessarily need to be done by you. So now this whole page has been subdivided by categories, by the traffic light. So what is left are your life activities.

So now it's a case of dividing the giant shopping list, to-do list, into two sub-lists. List number one, we are going to call this the to-action list. So these are the activities that you need to action. And then on the second list, we are going to call this the to life list. This is the list of activities that relate to your life. This, as I said earlier, are the buy the thing, do the thing, send the thing, reply to the thing, wrap the thing, all of those life activities.

And then on the other list, the to action list, these are the the activities that need to get done. So these green activities, let's really go into this a little bit more. These are the things that are your job. These are the things that are moving the needle. These are the projects where you're the subject matter expert. You are in charge of doing the thing. The amber activities are activities that are leading towards that.

So they don't necessarily need to be done today. And as I said, they also don't necessarily need to be done by you. Because classically in the jobs that we're doing in our businesses and in our corporate jobs, things get blurred. To-do lists get divided out. About job descriptions get confused and the world moves very, very fast, which is where then these pink activities, it really becomes a whole nother conversation.

So let's dive into these pink activities for a minute, because depending on the job role that you do, the situation that you're in, there are some subcategories around what is a pink activity. Now, as I said earlier, these are not things that need to be done today and they're not necessarily things that need to be done by you so in theory some of these activities could be delegated to other people or deleted altogether now this is in theory and we don't live in a perfect world.

So there are some activities that we all need to do that we don't want to do and that in theory are not really our responsibility. If you're in a business, there are lots of things that you have to do that are definitely not your responsibility. But if you are in a career, in a job, a profession, then this also happens as well. So this conversation comes from two angles.

If you're in a business and you haven't read the book, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, I highly highly recommend that I found that so beneficial to understand when I went from my job where I was responsible for a whole job section sector to my business where I was then responsible for everything not just marketing responsible for sales I'm responsible for business development I'm responsible for admin I'm responsible for operations everything this book helped me to to realize this.

That's an aside. Back to the conversation. So these activities we don't necessarily want to do and can not realistically be delegated or deleted today. What can we do to make this situation better? Well, we live in a technological age these days, the era of technology technology where things can be systemized, things can be automated, things can be outsourced to AI. I want to encourage you to become the observer of these tasks.

As you are doing them, think in three different ways. Think, I am not going to be doing this task for much longer. When somebody asks me how to do it, what do I tell them? And what I mean by this is start to to process map out that job role. Imagining somebody else is going to take it over. So they would call this your SOP, your standard operating procedure. Create a process for that activity. Thinking in your head, somebody else is going to be doing it.

How would I tell them to do it? Now it's gone. The second thing while you're doing this activity is think, what technology could help me improve this, could speed it up, could automate it, could systemize it. And then the third thing, how could AI help with this? Are there certain parts of this process that up until now have been very manual because that's the way the world was, but now with artificial intelligence, there are systems and processes that could speed it up.

This will help help make all of those pink activities on your to-do list more bearable until you get to a place and a stage where they can be outsourced, delegated, deleted, given to other people. And this also helps that decision to be made much more easily because when people see it on a piece of paper, it's very obvious for them to then go, yeah, of course you shouldn't be doing this. And thank you so much for helping make the process easier for somebody else.

And also, you're making it obvious that it doesn't fit with your skill set, your objectives, your KPIs. So now we have this to action list this conversation here today is how to tame your to-do list we're focusing in more specifically on your career on your business on your work activities so we're not going to talk about your life activities your to life list so let's park that to one side but you now have that and you can apply what we're going to talk about to that in a similar way.

This action list needs to be scheduled. So this is the second part of the conversation. Once you've taken everything out of your brain onto the paper, you've categorized it, you've prioritized it, now how do we get it done? How do we get it done is we schedule what needs to be done when it needs to be done by.

So we are taking these green activities which need to be be done today and these orange activities which need to be done maybe this week and we are putting them into your calendar and how we put them or you put them into your calendar is going to be determined by what days of the week you are able to do focus work, what kind of activities these are and how you can group these activities.

And then what else do you need to know in order to be able to do these activities? Because it might be that there is more information that's needed, that you're waiting on other teams. So although it needs to be done today, the activity might be ask a team for the data in order to be able to do it.

And this being the time management podcast, we want to know how to achieve these activities and get them done in the shortest most efficient amount of time so let's talk about deep work and let's talk about the flow state and let's talk about the ultradian rhythm so there's a great book by cal newport called deep work where he first started the discussion about the fact that when we can work in chunks of time and go deep into that,

we will be able to increase our productivity and achieve the actual desired outcome, aka we get the thing done. This then builds on the work by a Hungarian psychologist in the 1970s called

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work identified that when we are absorbed in doing what we do, time ceases to exist. And he called this flow state. Which then is built upon by the work of a sleep scientist called Nathaniel Kleetman, who took the idea and the concept of the circadian rhythm and then proceeded to build on that with his own work and research, noticing something called the REM cycles.

So we sleep in 90-minute cycles going deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, and then coming out, out, out, out, out. And then he took that work on to the next step and saying that if we sleep like this, perhaps we also work like this. And that work became known as the ultradian rhythm. So their science is around the concept that we can work in 90 minute chunks of time in the same way that we sleep in 90 minute chunks.

Links and this is how deep work the flow state and the ultradian rhythm can all link together now obviously it goes without saying when it comes to science there are lots of people who agree lots of people who don't agree but ultimately with this podcast and everything i share it's my intention to get you curious to get you on the journey and to help you to see if this resonates with you if this works for you to trust

your intuition and to understand as well that your circumstances are also going to play a big part in all of this because the theory can be great but if it doesn't work in your life then it doesn't work. All of this science is bringing together the fact that we can understand what is going to stop us from being more productive and what is going to help us to be more productive.

Because I don't know about you, I am yet to meet anybody who wants to work more, who wants to do more, and who wants it to be harder. When we can identify that the distractions that are around us, the tidiness or untidiness of the desk, the workspace that we are in, the notifications that we have on or off are all all affecting our ability to focus and how can I turn them off? When can I turn them off? What can I do? These sorts of questions will help me. They will help you.

They will help us to achieve more with the time that we have, aka become more productive. And this understanding for me is really the art and the science of bringing together all of the information that's out there, using all of these books, and then practically creating the process that works for you. Because it's all well and good saying, well, I will just put into my diary these 90-minute chunks of time.

However, if you need to be contactable, if these are not the right days of the week to put these chunks of time in because there are meetings. If it's just a noisy environment on those specific days at those specific times, the theory goes out of the window. So it goes without saying in this conversation, all of the information needs to then be applied with the overlay of your own particular circumstances.

So I touch on these books, I touch on these theories, I talk about about them in my book, Time Management for Entrepreneurs and Professionals, to highlight that these concepts are out there. However, simple doesn't necessarily mean it's easy until you actually apply it, try it, adapt it, get the result and see what happens and do it again and improve and create your own process.

So this conversation today has built on many other conversations on the podcast, solo episodes, guest episodes, where we are generally talking about the fact that knowing where all your time is going is going to help you to maximize that time that you actually have. So some homework for you from this episode. In the show notes, there will be a link to how to time audit. If you've not already done a seven-day time audit, click that link.

You can go on there, follow the instructions and do it for free. You can buy the book for more information. You can download the free chapter of the book to get started. There's videos on there. There's written and explanations because as a neurodiverse learner, I personally also need to learn by seeing things as well as hearing things. So that is a great first step. And then as a second step, try this traffic lighting your to-do list. See what happens.

Let us know. Let me know. Send me a message. Write in the comments of wherever you're listening to this episode, watching this episode. If it's on YouTube, you're listening on one of the social platforms. Leave a review as well if you're listening to the the podcast. They are so, so helpful. We're now in 58 countries around the world and have passed through the 5,000 download milestone, which is so, so, so exciting.

So thank you for sharing the podcast with your friends, for tuning in every week. If there are things you would like me to talk about on these solo episodes, send me a message as I would love to address the challenges that you have when it comes to time management. But this is a short and sweet episode for you today to help you to tame that to-do list this week, to understand the science behind something that is as simple as a piece of paper and three highlighter pens.

And this is how I like to take an analog process and turn it into a digital process by aka writing physically on a piece piece of paper and then putting it into a schedule because it is going to be dependent on the fact that maybe some of those activities on your to-do list are team related activities perhaps you work in a big team or a department you work on projects you need to share things so there are going to be different

systems that you might be using and we're not going into it in this conversation today but you might be using asana you might be using click up other different tools there are huge number of them out there. You might be sort of in the place where you're trying to convince your company to try some of these different tools. Try them yourself. See how they work. If you're in a position to experiment, experiment.

If you can experiment with your own to-life list, maybe you start using a system for that and try out the app. And then how you do one thing is how how you do everything. So, oh, if I could use this for my life, could I use this for work? Be curious. Take away from this episode that lifelong learning is your key to success. We are here to evolve. We are here to innovate. We are here to try new things over and over and over again. There is no end. This is life journey until the actual end.

And until the actual end, I truly believe that it is a game of trial and learning, trial and learning.

And it's not about errors we learn from what we try and what we learn we then apply and I feel like this is something that if we can really really embrace this trial always evolving always evolving I'm just here to always evolve this is a skill set along with the ability to focus which will be hugely hugely mutually advantageous and desirable for the next decades into the future in the career world, in the business world, and also in your life.

Until next time, my friend, stay safe, stay well, and remember, it's your time. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode. If you loved what you heard, be sure to let me know by leaving a review so I can keep the good stuff coming. Come and say hi on instagram at success by design training or visit my website. Successbydesigntraining.com or connect with me on linkedin just search abigail barnes until next time don't forget you are amazing and it's your time.