today I'm going to show you how to take a to-do list that looks like this to something that looks like this and it's not as difficult as you may imagine but first in order to get to this stage we're going to have to do a little bit of background work and that's what I'm going to show you how to do right now now most people's problems with to-do list is not that they don't work it's that they are throwing so much stuff into them it's essentially what I think of in terms of task based productivity now there's a problem with task-based productivity in that you have no control over what is coming in you have no control how many emails you're going to get today you have no control how many messages through slack or Microsoft teams that you will get today or even WhatsApp messages you just have no control over that part of a productivity system but there is one part that you do have complete control over and that is time so what I'm going to show you today is how to transition away from task based productivity to time based productivity the one area that you do have complete control of whether you accept that or not but you do actually have complete control over time now why is that well every day when you start the day whatever time you wake up you have essentially 24 hours now nobody can take that away from you similarly nobody can actually take away from you what you do with that time each day I mean you could wake up this morning and you could say I'm not in the mood I'm going to call a siki now that's a britishism for calling in sick now you have every right to do that if you wish right may be the wrong word but you'll certainly have the control to do that if you wish to do it probably not the best career move but certainly something that you can do so what I'm going to show you in this video is how to structure to do this but you could do this in pretty much any task manager so that what you are doing is allowing your calendar the one thing that you do have control over to actually become the Hub of your whole productivity system and your task manager is just there to remind you of the things that you should be doing or may need to do and that's exactly what a to-do list should be doing a list of things that you can or should be doing but your calendar is telling you this is how much time you have available each day so let's go into todoist and get it set up so that it can start matching and working with your calendar okay so the first place to begin is with your labels now to get to your labels you just go to filters and labels which you can see here on the left hand sidebar it will take you into your filters and labels now normally when you open it up it will also have your filters open I've actually just closed that so I don't want distract you so if you look here these are my genuine labels so we've got eight of them in total so I got projects writing audio visual clients should be clients Communications admin planning and chores now what I like to do is to actually color code these now they're not quite in the right order writing is actually where most of my work comes from because I do a lot of writing projects true but also I have a lot of client work to do so that would go into second and then I would probably have my projects an audio visual uh I would want to just edit that and give it a color of red because that is a critical part of my work I think of that in terms of my core work now Communications Yeah it's red at the moment but what I'm going to do is I'm going to change that color to an orange color because it's not quite as important whoops we go back to filters and labels it's not quite as important as the other so there's something that I just do now that doesn't help too much but it does give you an indication of the importance of your different categories of work so once you've got those set up now what you can do is then go into your tasks now the way I do this is when I'm doing my weekly planning I make sure that my labels are are accurate so if you look in my this week here I've got admin Communications admin Communications admin Communications and projects and that actually would normally be a typical week to be fair because a lot of our work is pretty much admin and dealing with Communications maybe you're a bit different but you'll find that the majority of your work is going to probably come in Communications and admin a lot of it may be projects if that's the kind of work you do cuz it all depends on the kind of work you do so if I go back to my filters and labels you'll see what I mean by this these reflect the work that I do this does not reflect the work that you do it all depends on the kind of work that you do now from example I can tell you now that the bottom four you are probably going to have we all probably well we all have to deal with Communications admin planning is an important one and chores we all have chores to do so I'm guessing that you will have a reason to use those four the top four on there is really the kind of work you're doing if you're a teacher you're probably going to have labels for class material preparation if you are a designer you may have different designs types or categories of work that you do you've got to think about what your core work is for those critical top four labels to be fair it doesn't really matter the order you put them in but it's nice to see a way of categorizing by prioritization if you like so let's go back to my this week so this is what I've got for this week now this does not include things like my recurring areas of focus if I go into here you can see there's quite a few there's two of them right here that need to be done today and if I go into my routines you can see today there's probably a few more that needs to be done today as well so my day actually in total is nine tasks now what you'll find when you come to this is that normally most people do not have any kind of categorization in their today list it's just a long list of stuff to do now this is what I see most of my coaching clients doing but what happens is is that now you're going to see oh this is a long list of stuff to do and you'll find yourself just cherry-picking the easy stuff and leaving the more complex stuff to later in the day when you're tired probably a bit squeezed for time it's not a good strategy so what you can do in to do is is you can go to the view section up here tap on that and you can go to the sort by grouping now you can click on that and you can do go go by Group by label now once you've done that your categories are going to show up now Monday when I'm recording this unusually this week uh that is going to be normally a writing day for me audio visual is usually done on Wednesday in a moment I'll show you my calendar just to show you how your labels and your calendar work hand inand now if you are a more visual person you can go back to the view section and you can go by board once you've got the grouping then you've got here uh your writing Audio Visual and stuff like that incidentally with the new calendar view you can actually put in drop down here all the other things that you have down for today I've got a lot of stuff schedule for today but that's just just a sidebar but the most important thing is now I've got my categories here so I personally prefer to look at things in a list you may prefer to see things as a a board it's entirely up to you but as you can see by using that grouping function I can now categorize the different types of work I do however when it now comes to my calendar this also starts to work so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click the Plus on here we'll stick to all doing all this in Google let's go to my calendar and so if you can see my well you can see my calendar now what you'll notice is every morning I try to protect except Thursday and Sundays I try to protect 9:30 to 11:30 now the kind of work I do I accept that I have a lot more autonomy over my calendar but even those of you who don't have a lot of autonomy over your calendar I still think think it's really important to fight for the right to party no to fight for that time to protect that time for you to get on and do that focused work so as you'll notice here Monday is usually a writing time I haven't changed my calendar to reflect recording videos writing time also on Tuesday Morning usually I will record videos on a Wednesday morning I have coaching calls on Thursday and then I got writing time on Friday and then my favorite block of the week is my Saturday morning which is admin and planning time which I absolutely love because I can put music on in the background not being disturbed by anybody I can just get on and plan the following week I mentioned before that one of the most critical parts of this time-based productivity is you don't have any control over the number of emails and messages coming in at you each day it's just beyond your control you don't know who's going to click Send and send you an email one thing you do know though is every day you're going to get email even on the week for most of us we getting email if you can carve out 1 hour a day just dedicated to dealing with your Communications you are not ever going to build a backlog now it could be that you have a backlog right now and you're going to need a maybe 90 minutes most days to get back on top of it but once you've got your email under control whoo now there's no problems because you've got an hour every day to deal with your Communications similarly I have an hour for admin now I'll be perfectly honest about admin it's very rare that I need the full hour although today if we go back to my to-do list I know I will need the full hour because when I get down to the admin time I've got this task here which is sort out the vat returns for my for my accountant and I know that's going to take me 4045 minutes so there is a few things there and there's also I've got an approval form to approve for Graham which also I will get done today and that means that that hour is going to get taken up pretty I'm pretty sure that will get taken up my communication stuff here that will probably easily no problem getting done these send the current edits to my for review ask God job to take care of Mr solo you know that's just like quick Communications action this day I don't know yet I mean it's only around about 11: 12 P 12:00 p.m. here now so I don't know how many emails are in my action this day and it doesn't matter because I'm not going to be doing any email until looking at my calendar if you see that 300 p.m. so in the next 3 hours I will do my communication but right now I'm not doing it so as you can see you match I've got writing time audio visual time writing time admin and Communications usually I will have a if I need it I will have a project block somewhere around here I mean I've got enough space in my calendar to deal with all the unknown emergencies that are going to happen but a lot of those emergencies often just require me me to do some form of communication so I will do it at 300 p.m. and that's the secret or if you like that's the method of being able to shift yourself away from being task-based which is just not sustainable to being more time based where you are categorizing your work and allocating blocks of time to do that work so that each day you're always on top now let's be honest most of you are not emergency First Responders like you do not need to respond instantly to every message from a client or boss that comes in now if you're deceiving yourself and you believe that to be the case then that is the first thing you need to sort out talk to your customers talk to your boss that is unsustainable you'll never be able to get any work done if you allow other people to interrupt you when they want to interrupt you come on get hold of that one that's something that you can can change the alternative is if you think about it you don't want your lawyer to be the kind of person who says excuse me judge I need to take this call from a client that would really frustrate you similarly you wouldn't want a surgeon performing surgery on you stopping every 5 minutes to go and answer a call from his boss or her boss that's you know think about how you come across as a professional you know okay I'll get back to you within the next 2 or 3 hours that's normally nine times out of 10 that's absolutely abolutely fine always you're going to need to deal with that issue if it is a problem for you because that's separate from this and you'll never be able to change anything until you take get control of that situation but that's a sidebar but this is how you do it this is how you get your task manager so that it's working for you and not against you by creating anxiety and stress it's such a simple little shift into doist just work out what your categories of work are organiz your today list by the on The View option up there you can group it by label and now you're using your calendar and to doist together now I have not found a way of being able to do this into doist so that I can allocate the tasks because I wouldn't want to do that I want to keep some flexibility in my day for example I have a writing block tomorrow and let's just say that writing this week's blog post I have no idea what I want to write it's not fully formed I can just reschedule that for tomorrow I have another writing block for tomorrow perhaps the only thing I will write today is my learning note and the coaching feedback that might be it the videos obviously I'm doing right now so this helps you to keep some kind of flexibility in your week because I have three writing blocks each week so if some of this I don't want to do today I can move off until another day now if you want to learn more how I actually use to-do on a day-to-day basis then my latest Tod doist setup video is the one to watch next which you can see just up there above my left shoulder