785: Make Your Task List Work for You, with Liane Davey

About this episode

Liane Davey discusses strategies to improve task lists and manage workload effectively.

Liane Davey: Thoughtload For the past 25 years, Liane Davey has researched and advised teams on how to achieve high performance. She is the author of You First and The Good Fight and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. She is the author of the new book Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work ( Amazon , Bookshop )*. We all love to hate our task lists. However, we can do a lot better with just a bit of strategy. In this conversation, Liane and I explore how to make our task list work for us instead of against us. Key Points Often it’s not really the workload that’s crushing – it’s more so the thinking about all the workload. That’s what thoughtload is. The problem with a to-do list is that everything goes on it. Thus, to-do lists are terrible for managing your attention. Instead of one task list, keep a limited amount of tasks on three priority lists. Category 1 list: your most important outputs and outcomes. Category 2 list: what you do to help others achieve their most significant outcomes. Category 3 list: administrative stuff. Four questions determine what gets on your lists: Important (an activity that will add value to a key output…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Stachowiak

Guest: Liane Davey

Topics covered

• task management
• productivity
• team performance
• workload
• strategies

Keywords

• task list
• thoughtload
• productivity strategies
• team performance
• work management

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard Business Review

Books & works: You First, The Good Fight, Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work

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