Checklists as a Productivity Tool
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. As regular readers of AMBeat know, a lot of what I talk about relates to productivity and how one can become more productive. Personally, I have tried just about everything to be as productive as possible from installing web applications that track how I spend my time online to completely shutting down my computer when I needed to complete offline work.
However, of all the tactics that I have tried the most effective solution has been the simplest: getting organized and making a series of checklists off all the tasks I had to complete on a daily basis, targets I had to reach on a weekly basis (x number of sales, etc.), and longer term goals I hoped to accomplish for my business.
I recently wrote another guest post for John Chow on the subject matter where I shared my series of checklists for getting things done here at AMBeat.com Here is an excerpt from the post:
For AMBeat, I divide my checklist into three different categories, content, promotion, and other issues. I then create a list of short term goals that need to be completed within the next week or so.
For the sake of this example, lets use the “content” category of my checklist. I know that in the short term, I need to have at least five in-depth articles written this week and more planned for following weeks. From here I can make a separate checklist for each article complete with everything which needs to get done for that article (research, interviews, etc.) and the deadline for completion of these activities. With these checklists in hand I can go to work completing everything that needs to get done in a timely fashion.
