Most Important Tasks (MITs)

One of the common themes from many experts on organizing your time and your life is that you should be aware of and pay attention to your long term goals. Unless you give them some attention, the most common result is that short term day-to-day activities, which are easier to do but much less important in the long run, tend to crowd out work on the more important longer term goals. If you have to chose between starting to prepare for a second career after retirement, and checking your email this morning..... well I think we'll all generally decide that checking your email is an easier task to get your arms around, so let's do that first. And so it goes, with an unlimited stream of short term activities continuously sprouting up and pushing out the really important stuff.

One way around this is to make a short three item to-do list each morning containing of your three Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day. You can then add other tasks which may or may not get done, but make sure that you spend adequate time on the three MITs. At least one of these tasks, if not all of them, should be related to longer term goals.

The more I think about it, the more I like this approach. Even my wife said it sounded like a great idea. So I started giving it a try, with the goals of keeping up this habit rigorously for 2 months to help get it established as a longer term habit. The results after the first few days? Great success at writing down my 3 MITs - it really does help you focus on the important longer term tasks. I strongly recommend it. Actually getting my MITs accomplished (or at least spending adequate time on them to make some progress)... well.. it turns out that habit is going to take some work still. Simply having a birthday does not cause change to happen, it's going to take some more work.