For the last few weeks I’ve felt overloaded at work with an ever increasing to do list which I wasn’t making much impact on. Instead of the usual 3 sheets of double sided A5 paper it had stretched on to the 5th sheet and I was finding it unmanageable.
You know what it is like, each time you look at your list it makes you feel down because you don’t know how you will be able to clear it. Plus because you are writing everything down the list is growing longer each day; and usually by more tasks than you cross off. However all this changed a few days ago.
 I had a meeting postponed and decided to spend the hour rewriting my to do list, removing all the completed tasks (shown crossed in yellow) and the tasks which no longer needed doing (shown crossed out). I aim to rewrite my list once a week, but due to the length of the list I had put it off again and again as I felt it would be wasted time because I hadn’t completed many of the tasks.
It actually took me an hour and a quarter to rewrite the list, but the result was a to do list almost half the length of the old one; just slightly over four sides. It looks cleaner and neater so I feel more positive when reading, but most importantly I can easily see all the tasks without automatically skimming over large chunks that I saw as completed.
So by completing one task I managed to half my to do list and gain control of all my outstanding actions. A valuable reminder for me that it is worth doing tasks like this and the weekly review because the positive gain by far outweighs the chore.