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If you have a lot to do every day, it might be hard to figure out how to prioritize it all. You can try to decide what’s urgent and what isn’t, build a detailed schedule, and use tech 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 getting familiar with Forster’s Commitment Inventory to sort it all out—especially if you’re a person who likes visual aids to conceptualize your day.
What is the commitment inventory?
The commitment inventory was thought up by British productivity expert Mark Forster, author of Get Everything Done: And Still Have Time to Play. Essentially, this method acknowledges that your time is finite, so you need to allocate your minutes and energy carefully, determining in advance how much time you can devote to any given task. In that way, it's similar to time blocking and time boxing, which call on you to determine in advance how you'll spend every minute of your day, then input it all into your calendar.
It’s helpful for when you don’t feel like your daily responsibilities contribute enough to your bigger priorities, when you struggle to turn down new projects or asks, or when you feel like you’re stretched too thin to do meaningful work on any of your tasks. Keeping sight of your larger goals, and how smaller daily tasks play into them, is a crucial part of any productivity plan because it helps you stay motivated.
How to make a commitment inventory
First, think of how much time you have in your day to actually do your work. It might be a standard eight or 10 hours, for instance, depending on what you’re doing, but you need to have a solid number in mind. Next, make an exhaustive list of everything you need to do for the day, from minor tasks like answering emails to bigger ones like working on a group-based project.
Do this in an Excel spreadsheet for best results, because you’re also going to need to figure out how much time each is going to take. If emails are going to take you half an hour, write 30 minutes in the column next to that task, for example. When you’re done, add up how many minutes all of those duties will take if you spend the amount of time on them that you indicated you have to. If they take longer than the time you have for the day to devote, you need to retool. Don't give yourself too much time, though—remember Parkinson's Law: Your work will expand to fill all the time you give yourself, making you waste time. So hack a few minutes off each of your totals.
You can’t spend more than 100% of your time—it’s obviously not possible—so next, prune tasks you don’t absolutely need to do and lessen the time you have to spend on ones that are less important. Once you’ve moved around the time you can give to each task, use the spreadsheet data to make a pie chart. That visual aid is going to show you what to prioritize for the day and what order to do it all in—i.e. biggest slice to smallest—so you can be sure you’re giving enough of your time and energy to the most important tasks.
From there, you can break the tasks down into smaller ones, but you should work in the order that your pie chart lays out.
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