Today’s Top 3: The Simple Habit That Gets Important Work Done

Written By MColleen Klimczak

In last week’s article and episode, “Where Did the Time Go? Try a ‘Done List’”, I mentioned the productivity strategy of establishing “Today’s Top 3”.

“Today’s Top 3” refers to designating at the beginning of your day (or the night before) your three   highest priority tasks for today and getting those done first, if possible, or making sure you have a solid plan for how and when you will accomplish them today.

Today’s Top 3 and the Done List work together to identify, prioritize and complete our most important work. The best outcome, of course, is that the “Done List”, the list of things you actually accomplished today, hopefully contains “completed or at least made progress on Today’s Top 3 tasks of X, Y and Z”!

Now that I’ve laid that all out, I am going to say that it might not be three, it might be 2 or 4!  It’s the idea that we’re working on today, no need to get rigid on the specifics!

It’s interesting to me, I am sharing strategies to get important work done on your typical day on a day that is NOT my typical day. I started composing this content as I drove to Michigan to be with my parents last week. My Top Three that day looked vastly different than my typical Top Three. And that’s ok, because, again, It’s the idea that we’re working on today and the process remains the same every day, even if the list looks different!

Let’s talk about the Why of Today’s Top Three.

Doing Important Work:

First, creating Today’s Top Three is an assurance that you WILL get important work done. YES!

And pairing the Done List with Today’s Top 3 reminds us that if those tasks don’t get done today, they’re the start of tomorrow’s list.

We don’t have to get it right every day, but we can still work on establishing the practice of choosing and prioritizing our most important tasks for each day.

Prioritizing.

You, like me, likely have dozens of things you could do today and maybe even should do today. 

And, you and I do not have unlimited resources of time and money and energy therefore we must prioritize how to spend those resources and on what. Yes, we may have dozens of tasks, in addition to appointments and meetings, that we could on any given day, but we need to identify which ones are higher priority.

And no, not everything has a high priority, or the same priority. Because, when everything is your favorite, nothing is your favorite. 

Managing Interruptions.

Creating Today’s Top 3 helps us manage interruptions, making it easier to get back to our essential work if we get led off track, either by others or by our own brains!

Planning the Work:

The time we have to DO our work might not match perfectly with our capacity for DECIDING on our work.  So we DECIDE on our plan for the work at a time that is good for us, like tonight for tomorrow, and we DO the work when we planned to do it.

Now, let’s look at the How.

As we consider the HOW to create Today’s Top Three, I want to remind you and me about some of the productivity practices, the tools in our productivity tool box, that we have to help us.

Our Routines and Habits

Today’s Top 3 is likely not to include “take a shower” or “take my vitamins”, though it certainly can.  When we establish routines and habits to take care of our needs, ourselves, our homes and our personal and professional maintenance tasks, we can turn our attention and decision making to more important and impactful work, like Today’s Top 3.

Focus Areas

When we know what is important to us - to our hearts and our heads and our work - we can cut out the time and thought clutter. I don’t know your Focus Areas (though you can re-read or listen to content about Focus Areas to figure that out for yourself!), but I’ll share mine as examples.  My Focus Areas are Family, Home, Wellness, My Company, and Service and Ministry. Today’s Top 3 will ABSOLUTELY be attached to these Focus Areas. Because that is why we HAVE Focus Areas.

Goals, SMART and PACT

Back in January, we looked at Goal Setting using SMART and PACT goal setting. Goals help guide our steps. They are our Focus Areas made more specific and actionable.  And they help us break large goals into smaller more manageable steps and tasks.

Which leads me to the tools of To Do Lists and maybe, after last week, even a Done List.

The Eisenhower Box is one of my favorite tools.

The Eisenhower Box helps us prioritize tasks based on the axes of Important (v. Not important) and Urgent (v. Not urgent).  For Today’s Top 3, we will want to look at the tasks that are both Important and Urgent or time specific.

And finally, we need the tool of Realistic Time Estimates, because Today’s Top 3 need to match the time we have today.

If I don’t have 12 hours of undedicated time today, it’s not feasible for me to say Today’s Top 3 are to spend four hours each on launching the neurodiversity page on my website, planning liturgy for the next three months at church and working on a new presentation for a new topic. 

Priorities don’t change but available time today might change. For example, Today’s Top 3, in addition to daytime client appointments and an evening choir rehearsal, might need to be “make progress on my Top 3” instead of fully complete them because that’s all the time I have.

More on the “How”:

Let’s assume that we sit down and look at our To-Do List for today.  The list only contains tasks that align with our Focus Areas and our Goals.  Yeah us!  Then we look at our calendar for the day, and establish we will have 3 hours this afternoon to work on Today’s Top 3. 

Now, how to decide:  In addition to all the other tools and factors we’ve already considered, What makes one task a higher priority for today than another? Here are some questions to ask yourself.

  • Are other people relying on this work? Or are do you have tasks later in the week that required today’s completion of the work?

  • Is this task about scheduling something that takes collaboration, like a meeting, 

  • Is this a financially impactful task?  Like paying a bill before it’s too late?  Or conversely,  following up on booking an event or to get paid!

  • Is this task time sensitive, or on a short deadline?

  • Also time related, is this a task I can only complete at certain times and days, like speaking to someone at the doctor’s office and they’re only open from 10-5 on weekdays?.

  • Is this task health related and would benefit from being addressed sooner rather than later?

  • Have you moved the task multiple times from list to list?

With our tools in hand and the answers to these questions, we decide on Today’s Top 3. Of course we can and will get other work done, too, but with this strategy we’re more likely to get our important work done.

To Recap, 

  • “Today’s Top 3” refers to designating at the beginning of your day (or the night before) your three highest priority tasks for today and getting those done first, if possible, or making sure you have a solid plan for how and when you will accomplish them today.

  • Since we don’t have unlimited time or money or energy to dedicate to our tasks today, we must be strategic in deciding what we need to do today.

  • Establishing Today’s Top 3 ensures we do important work, prioritize our tasks, manage our interruptions and match up our available time with the tasks we need to complete.

  • Today’s Top 3 collaborates nicely with the tool I introduced last week, the Done List. 

  • In addition, using Today’s Top 3 utilizes other tools we already have like Routines and Habits, Focus Areas for what’s important to us, Goal Setting, To-Do Lists, the Eisenhower Box, and Realistic Time Estimates.

I invite you to think about Today’s Top 3 as a new tool to help you navigate your days and week, to get your most important work done!

MColleen Klimczak
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Where Did the Time Go? Try a “Done List.”