Managing Time & Priorities Through Your Bucket List
Guest Post by Darren Krause, Journalist, LiveWire Calgary
We’ve all heard the term ‘bucket list.’
It’s that index of items you want to do or accomplish by the time you kick the bucket.
It’s basically your life’s to-do list.
Now some of you may use the term buckets for other things:
Talking with your kids about making people feel good (filling up their buckets)
The practical application of splitting up your paycheque (or kids’ allowances) into areas of savings, bills and discretionary spending.
There are several different metaphorical and practical ways we include buckets in our lives.
This one might be a new one for you. It’s a blend of these concepts.
If you’re anything like me, you produce a daily to-do list. It’s that ever increasing, point-form archive of all the things you need to get done.
For most of us, that to do list gets bigger and bigger as the day goes on. When that happens, less and less seems to get done.
(After doing a bit of additional research, I realize there’s something out there called the six-box method and this resembles that, but there are some differences.)
I’m a journalist and a new small business owner. Most entrepreneurs recognize that they have several areas of a business to monitor. I started off with a traditional to-do list that would reach 15 or 20 items long. Daily.
Talk about paralysis by analysis. Which one do I take care of first? So, step one. Prioritize.
The human mind is a funny thing; instead of prioritizing by importance, I would often prioritize by the ones I could get done quickly. This made me feel productive. But, it wasn’t at all effective.
After tinkering for a bit and thinking about this bucket list, my wife and I have been to see a game in all the major league baseball, football, hockey and basketball stadiums, I thought – “could I employ this idea into my daily work routine?”
That’s where my bucket list approach started.
I began with three areas: Editorial. Business. Personal.
(Side note: The personal one was another trigger for doing this because I realized that I was spending an inordinate amount of time on the journalism and the business – and none on me. That’s a sure recipe for becoming less efficient and effective overall.)
This list has expanded to six tracking areas: Editorial ‘to-do’, business, stories I need to make contacts on, stories ready to write, personal and something called ‘pool’ which helps me track assignments that I’ve farmed out to other writers.
The goal each day is to complete at least two things in the primary buckets (editorial, business, personal) and one in the others.
This breaks down that staggeringly long list of to-dos into areas that are more manageable. In doing so, I personally feel like I’m operating in a more balanced way, attending to emerging needs in my business.
The beauty is you can change the lists as your job evolves. You can do this for your personal life, your home life or heck, even your nutrition.
Taking death out of the equation makes this a simple way you can improve your productivity by moving items into buckets that matter and tackling your day one manageable task at a time.
