📝 How I Create My To-Do Lists

I am often asked, ‘How do you manage to do everything? How do you juggle all the different hats successfully?’

The answer is I focus my energy on things that move the levers in medical school, my business or academia the most.

This is linked to Pareto’s principle (80/20 rule), something I hadn’t encountered until I started this journey. It states in very simple terms that:

When applied to work, you need to identify the tasks that give you the highest ROI, i.e., which tasks fall into your 20% and will give you an 80% return.

Identifying these tasks can be hard sometimes, and our to-do list can’t be long. So to identify the right tasks, I combine Pareto’s Principle with the Eisenhower Matrix:

I can quickly categorise all my tasks on Things 3 using this matrix. Whilst I don’t have anyone to ‘delegate’ tasks to, it highlights that those tasks are somewhere in the middle and should be tended to as and when possible.

(Things is also brilliant because it has an ‘inbox’ where I can register new tasks to categorise when I am free)

Once done, I create my to-do lists for the week having no more than three tasks to complete per day. 

If you aren’t already using these methods, give them a go! It isn’t necessarily about being as productive as possible but ensuring you complete the work which matters the most first.

Here is a brief update on where things are with my personal rebranding:

• ✅ Photoshoot (check out the new author pic)

• ✅ 1 new client

• ❌ Website: I have scheduled a deep work block this week to focus solely on this. I keep being pulled away by other things and leaving this behind.

• 🟰 Logo and Branding - This is coming on well. Final touches are needed, and I need to finalise a logo soon.

Thank you to everyone who’s been reading so far! Some days I think time is truly flying by!