Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact

This resource first appeared in issue #121 on 07 May 2022 and has tags Managing Your Career: Productivity, Becoming A Manager: Other

Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact - Brie Wolfson, First Round Review

We start off in tech with ticket trackers and to-do lists, and tend to carry that through to our first leadership jobs. But they’re inadequate when you become a manager or lead.

As a leader you no longer have the comfort of merely being responsible for set of discrete tasks that can be independently ticked off. You’re probably not even only responsible for individual projects. No, you’re responsible for much more nebulous things like ‘priorities’ and ‘efforts’ and ‘directions’ and ‘staff development’ and ‘stakeholder management’. Stuff that you can’t just cross off the list one day and be done with. How to keep track of stuff like that? They each certainly generate individual to-do tasks with alarming frequency, but you need some higher-level meta tracking too.

There isn’t a single answer, a single thing that you can do. (Isn’t being a leader awesome!) This article offers a number of documents Wolfson finds helpful, broken down into daily, monthly, and quarterly documents.

Ones I think are or might be particularly useful are:

An ongoing stack rank of all those nebulous ‘efforts’ and whatnot, with their priorities and broad themes of current work - it’s helpful and clarifying to have a list of all such things in one place
Updated lists of things you’re proud of, things you got stuck on, and things you learned
Going back periodically (how often will depend on the kind of work, I think) and updating a list of things you or your team got done that had real impact, and what the impact was