I’m an old fashion when it comes to my daily tasks list. I still use a notebook instead of OneNote or any other famous applications out there.
In my opinion, Dedicated hard-copy written text brings more attention with it as compared to any another excel\note which available in my computer\smartphone. But still… that’s my own opinion.
Today’s post is about my “self-developed algorithm” for generating a TO-DO list. How it works?
The range for Urgency and Importance is from [lowest] 1 to 5 [highest] (1,2,3,4,5) and for Ease of implementation is [hardest] 1 to 3 [easiest].
Range for Urgency and Importance:
- 1 = Not urgent\important
- …
- 5 = Very urgent\important
Range for Ease of implementation:
- 1 = Hard
- 2 =Medium
- 3 = Very easy
After we understood the ranges we’ll build the TO-DO matrix like this:
| Task | Urgency | Importance | Ease of implementation | Total |
| – | – | – | – | – |
| – | – | – | – | – |
Write down your daily tasks and set the score (by the range) for each column and work by the following formula : Urgency * Importance + Ease of implementation = Total
Sort the results while the highest total score is your first to-do task and the lowest is the last one…
For example:
| Task | Urgency | Importance | Ease of implementation | Total |
| Send an update mail | 5 | 5 | 2 | 27 |
| Read an article | 1 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Read mail from my boss | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
| Clean my mailbox | 1 | 4 | 2 | 6 |
So, this is how my TO-DO list will look like:
- Send an update mail (5*5+2)
- Clean my mailbox (1*4+2)
- Read an article (1*3+2)
- Read mail from my boss (1*1+3)
Hope you find it helpful.