Unconventional TO-DO’s to increase your productivity by 1000%

About me and my initials

I was an intern at a software company in my town for a couple of years. Just for my desire to up-scale my work ethics, increase my productivity and get more of a job done; I used to shift my work habit quite a lot, experimented quite a lot of methods and I found this were the tweaks in to-do’s that contributed to my productivity increase.

It was one of the contributing factors, that took me from a wannabe coder in Python (which is common to most of the beginners) to dive deep into areas like full stack development, machine learning, Flutter (just experimenting), Automation. I am still experimenting with new ideas about what works best for me and my job requirements but this methodologies are agile and flexible enough to adapt my uncertain prodigious change in area of interest.

Now, the piece of cake: The TO-DOs

The TO-DOs we are talking about, or the key to productivity are listed out as below:

1. Calendar Comparison List
2. Color coding and sorting List
3. KanBan list
4. 1 3 5 list

Calendar Comparison List

If you’re an online calendar person, plug your planned tasks in line with your meetings, and any priority projects in your free time or open windows. You could even go as far as to commit to timeframes for your tasks.

Here, you bind your to-do list with the corresponding time schedule, that you are going to execute the tasks.

organizing to-dos in calendar (most productive one though)

Color coded lists and sorted list

Here, you highlight your list content + you can sort out lists by the importance level (if you are using specific software like Microsoft To-Do). This lets you know which task has a higher or lower priority, which tasks should be executed first and which tasks can be done later (fill in tasks).

Highlighting the tasks

Kanban

This list has a head target as project and the tasks are broken down and assigned below the list as sub-tasks or minor units of the main head target. + you can assign and comment within the block a to-do unit. This is one of my personal favorites and although this is from a software arena, using kanban view to split and organize your to-dos is still a good idea in other areas as well.

Best to collaborate in teams.

Kanban board

1 3 5 list

This is a technique to divide a larger tasks into minor sub-tasks. The basic concept is ‘1’ which is main tasks divided into ‘3’ sub tasks and those ‘3’ tasks are further split into ‘5’ multiple units of sub-tasks that anyone can approach to do rather than just staring at the task ‘1’ and doing kinda regular procrastination which naturally happens in most of the cases.

Tooling

I use Microsoft To-do as my primary to-do organizer, although I go for Google keep with normal checkboxes notes as some random note outs.

Plus, I prefer Trello and Gitkraken Glo for my professional to-do handling.

Finally, physical notebook is the god-father of all of your methodologies. Basically, no software, no tech and nothing can replace the use of physical notebook for jotting down your To-Do’s.

References

1. Pinterest (for images)
2. Atlassian (for images)
3. PDFDrive (for research)
4. My personal experiences