If you're using any of these task management tools and yet you still find yourself drowning in overdue tasks, missed priorities, miscommunications, or dependencies that don't quite work. Well, it may not be the software that's the problem. In my experience, it's probably down to the four elements of a task that you or your team is missing. So, let's start off at the very top with one observable outcome. Observable outcome is about making your task names have a verb and a noun in them and relate to an achievement, an outcome for lack of a better word that you can see in reality. So we could have website as a task, but that would be terrible and not an observable outcome. We could have work on website. That's a little bit better because we've got a verb and a noun. But the problem with this one is when are we done? Work on website. Is that like just forever? To make it an observable outcome, we want to attach some kind of constraint to this. So it might be publish website page one. Okay, when that page is published, I know I'm done. Alternatively, we could say work on website for 30 minutes. When 30 minutes is done, I know I'm done. We just want to make sure that we have a clear completion or a finish line that we are working towards that means the same thing to multiple people. The reason this is important, even if you are a team of one, is because even if you are a oneperson team, you have at least two people you're managing. We've got you on Monday all brighteyed and bushy tailed. And then we've got you on Friday when you are exhausted and you're looking at your notes to self and you're like, "Wait, what the hell is that task?" Website website what what am I making a website, publishing a website? Even as a team of one, you have this dilemma. And especially if you are a team of multiple people, if someone's out on vacation, you want to make it very easy for others to step in and do your work. And to do that, we need to have clear, observable outcomes for our tasks. That brings us to the second category, which is one owner. We want one person who's responsible for getting us to the outcome. The key thing to remember here is that this is one singular human. Because if we have one person responsible, they know it's their problem. If we have multiple people responsible, it becomes like a high school group project where we all think, "Oh, I thought you did it. Oh, I thought you did it." And that just wastes everyone's time and causes too many distractions. So, one singular owner certainly you can have helpers, but each task one person. And I should say many project management software now allow you to adjust your settings to require all assigne fields to only have one name available. And if your project management software has that setting, I would definitely turn it on to make sure that you can only have one singular assigne, which makes this a whole lot easier to follow. Now, that brings us to the next component, which is one committed deadline. The easiest way to do this for most people is actually to pick a date on the calendar and say it needs to be finished by this date. Not started, not being worked on, but completely done by this date. There are some teams for whom dates are very hard. You're not so good at predicting those dates. Uh my next tip in the next section will help you with this. But if dates are just absolutely off the table for your team, which I know for some it is. The alternative here would be to use a Q system. So rather than saying it'll be done by August 1st, you will just say we are not doing anything else until this is done. And so everything runs in a queue and you do one thing. Once it's finished, you do the next thing. So then the actual flow of the queue becomes your deadline. And if you want to learn more about this, I have a free course in the description you might want to check out. when we set a deadline or when we establish a Q system, we as a team need to view that as a commitment and it needs to be sacred. Something I read in Charlie Gilki's book, Team Habits, which I highly recommend if you are nerding out about this topic, but he highlights the stat of commit to completion ratio and he talks about it in regards to projects, but I think it really works quite well here. Commit to completion is basically the ratio of how many things do we commit to do versus how many do we actually finish. But the higher that ratio is, the more trust you've built in the system and the more your team feels that, okay, if we're putting a due date on this, we're going to have this happen. If you'd like to learn more about kind of committing to deadlines and making sure overdoses don't happen, drop me a comment. Now, I saved the best for last because if there's just one thing you steal from this video to make your task list calmer and your systems work smoother, it is to make every task equal to one work sitting or less. So, one work sitting is referring to how long you can work uninterrupted on a given thing. Now, if you are busy single parent with kids at home that you're watching, that might be 10 to 15 minutes if you're lucky. If you're someone who's maybe an engineer, your focus work session might be anywhere between 90 minutes and 3 hours. The range of work sittings is really all across the board depending on the type of work you're doing. But across all clients we have worked with, we've now surveyed so many times. We've had over 4,000 data points of people we've analyzed and 20 minutes is by far the most popular time uh for a work sitting. Now, the most common question that then comes up is, well, Leila, what if I have something that's more than one work sitting, like designing a website for a client that could take 30 hours? In that case, what you have is a collection of tasks. You want to break that down until it's the size of your work sitting. So that means rather than website for John Doe, you could have tasks like wireframe page one, review page one, draft page one, publish page one, draft blog, revise blog, publish blog, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Breaking them all down until they're each equal to one work sitting, which makes them easier to schedule, easier to delegate, and easier to estimate how long and when you can actually do them. And to make this easier to steal and use for your team, go ahead and take a screenshot of this slide right here. This shows the four key components of a task and what happens if you happen to be missing one or more of these components. Namely, if you have something that looks like a task, but it takes more than one sitting, my friend, you have a project. So, go ahead and break that out with subtasks or checklists or just many tasks. And if you're missing any other combination of pieces, what you have, my friend, is an idea, which means it's a potential project or a potential task that hasn't yet worked itself out yet. When you are facing any new challenge in your business, it is likely going to fall into one of these three categories. But please do not start putting it on your task list until you actually make sure it is a task. I've seen so many clients go into their workday with a task list that looks something like this where they have two things on their plate and when they don't finish them they're like, "God damn, how did I not finish them? I'm so dumb. I just had two things to do today." But then when they look at their task list through this lens, they realize, "Oh, I didn't have two tasks to do today. I had one task and one project, and that project was actually 30ome tasks, and my work sitting is only 20 minutes. So, there's no way I'm going to get all of that done in one workday. Then all of a sudden, the shame spiral of having overdoses becomes a level of understanding. And the retroactive chaos of, "Oh my god, I'm so behind becomes calm, proactive planning where we can realize, oh yeah, I'm not going to get that done. So, let's start adjusting things proactively, looking forward rather than trying to clean up the mess that we've left behind." And of course, a hidden benefit of starting to create tasks that are actually the appropriate size is now you can see what you have to do, which makes it way easier to delegate pieces of what you have to do. And actually, if you were in that position where you're feeling overwhelmed, you start breaking it down and realize, "Oh my god, I have a lot to do. I need to delegate. Where do I start?" I have a free course for you in the description below. It's a free course that I've created for you that goes through how to start delegating for the first time, figuring out which tasks are worth delegating, and how to create SOPs to make it easier to hire for them. Completely free in the description below. My gift to you, and of course, screenshot this table if you haven't already. Thanks for watching and subscribing. And until next time, enjoy the process.