Use Forster’s Commitment Inventory to Prioritize Your Tasks
If you have a lot to do every day, it can be difficult to figure out how to prioritize everything. You can try to decide what’s urgent and what’s not , make a detailed schedule, and use technology to stay focused , but sometimes it’s hard to even know where to start. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should consider checking out Forster’s To Do List to get it right, especially if you’re someone who likes visual aids to reflect on your day.
What is a liability stock?
The Commitment Inventory was developed by British productivity expert Mark Forster, author of It’s All Done: There’s Still Time to Play . Basically, this method recognizes that your time is limited, so you need to carefully allocate your minutes and energy, determining in advance how much time you can devote to a particular task.
This is helpful when you feel like your day-to-day responsibilities don’t contribute enough to your more important priorities, when you’re struggling to turn down new projects or requests, or feel like you’re too stressed out to do meaningful work on any of your tasks. . by Todoist .
How to take inventory of liabilities
First, consider how much time you have in a day to actually do your job. For example, it could be the standard eight or ten hours, depending on what you’re doing, but you need to keep a hard number in mind. Then, make a comprehensive list of everything you need to do during the day, from small tasks like answering emails to larger tasks like working on a group project. Do this in an Excel spreadsheet for the best results because you will also need to figure out how long each one will take. If the email will take you half an hour, write, for example, 30 minutes in the column next to this task. When you’re done, calculate how many minutes it will take to complete all of these duties if you spend the indicated amount of time on them. If they take more time than you can devote to that day, you need to retool.
You can’t spend more than 100% of your time – that’s obviously impossible – so cut down on the tasks you absolutely don’t need and cut down on the time you have to spend on the less important. Once you have determined the amount of time you can devote to each task, use the spreadsheet data to build a pie chart. This visual aid will show you which tasks to prioritize throughout the day and in what order—that is, from highest to lowest—so you can be sure you are dedicating enough time and energy to the most important tasks.
From there, you can break down the tasks into smaller ones, but you must work in the order shown on the pie chart.