Have a to-do list longer than you know what to do with, or where to start? Feeling overwhelmed? Try giving your tasks an ROI value. ROI stands for return on investment. Usually, we want the highest ROI possible; it is a measure of how well the sale of a product or service went compared to how much we invested in things like ads, free trainings/webinars, our time invested.

Your Tasks Have An ROI

ROI is a common calculation in sales, and is usually calculated by dividing the investment by the return.Normally our ROI tells us how well a sale or promotion went for us. The higher the ROI means we made more per sale in relation to our costs for that product launch. The ROI for tasks that we are about to talk about is a number (1–4) assigned to each item on our to-do list or brain dump. It is the value we will get out of a task (our return) based on the amount of effort (our investment) we put into getting the task complete.

The ROI Equation

Not only does this method give us the MITs (Most Important Tasks) to work on first but it also can even eliminate things on our to-do lists because we see they are “1’s” and may end up deciding they are not worth the effort at all.  Whenever you have a long to-do list and just don’t know where to start. This could also be something you use daily, or weekly during your planning sessions to give you an idea of the tasks that you should begin with to make your day the most productive it can be.

ROI On Your To-Do List

Have a to-do list longer than you know what to do with, or where to start? Feeling overwhelmed? Try giving your tasks an ROI value. Here’s how ROI stands for return on investment. Usually, we want…

Stashed ideas

How to start when you have no idea where to start

In an economy, Pareto Optimal state when no further changes in the economy can make one person better off without at the same time making another worse off. Named after Italian economist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto">Vilfredo Pareto</a> , the idea simply refers to situations where you can (or can’t) improve something without trade-offs.Consider designing a car where you care about speed and safety.<ol><li>You have one design that’s fast but dangerous.</li><li>Another that is slow and safe.</li><li>A third that both moves like a tortoise and has the tendency to spontaneously catch fire.</li></ol>

Getting Better Without Getting Worse

How should you compare these three designs? The third option is obviously worse than the first two - it's slow and dangerous. But between the other two is a question of values. Maybe a race car driver would prefer faster at the cost of some safety. Maybe the soccer mom wants safety over speed.This is the idea of Pareto efficiency in a nutshell. A car design would be Pareto efficient if there’s no other design that allows you to get more speed or safety without getting less of the other.

Comparing Trades

What if there are more designs than the presented three? Such possibilities exist in some situations, surely with habits and situations. Here, putting them all on a graph, we can see that any of the ones on the inside of the frontier are bad choices. Why? Because there’s always a car that’s somewhat faster or safer without making sacrifices. There must always be something better, an ideal possibility, regardless of it's application in reality.

Efficiency Frontier

Efficient frontiers reveal a general pattern. When you’re below the frontier, you can always improve simply by optimizing your choice. You can make a better choice by just pick an option that has more of what you want.When you’re on the frontier, however, the only way to make the situation better is by deliberately making something else worse.

Patterns Of Trade

Let's say you plot all your schedules and leisures in a graph, it shows all your productive possibilities, time allotment, and situations of good work and sudden work.Now, is your situation is Pareto efficient? If we’re below the frontier, improvements is needed. We might choose to get more done without increasing our hours. The focus should be on trying to shift to a less wasteful situation.But if you're on the frontier, the way to improve is by accepting trade-offs. While pursuing an ambitious career move, accept that this has working nights and weekends.

Productivity Frontier

In engineering, new inventions promise faster and safer cars than what exist today. The frontier can shift.In your work, there’s always the possibility of radical changes that might break the current frontier. Maybe you find a technique that lets you get much more done in less time than usual.Innovating to push the frontier forward is good. But such radical improvements are much harder to come by than simply reorganizing among known alternatives.

Innovating Changes

If you're on the frontier, here are a few guidelines<ul><li>You’ve read and applied a lot of productivity advice, yoyre closer to the frontier and one who doesn’t even keep a to-do list is probably far from it.</li><li>When you look in your schedule, there aren’t a lot of things you could easily cut . If your day is full of activities you'd do more of, you’re on a frontier. If you find it with a lot of waste, there may be potential for easy wins.</li><li>Do efforts cause setbacks in other areas of life? When you pursued new ambitions and they came at a cost of important things, you’re closer to the frontier.</li></ul>

Are You On The Edge?

If you're far from edge, optimize. Treat each element in isolation and improve it.Want to improve your work? Just reorganize and get more done!If you're on the productive frontier, improvement comes from trade-offs. Would you rather have a clean house or more time to work on your project? Like whack-a-mole, investing more time in one thing, and losing time for another. You switch trying to get it all done.Be explicit about trade-offs. Stop and think about what you really care about and what you’re not willing to sacrifice. And it releases you from the guilt of trying to do everything.

Optimize Options

We all want to do everything, and feel guilty when we miss out on some. But.. 

Striving to eliminate waste is good. But eventually you'll reach a point where hard choices are needed to do better.

Career

Can You Get More Done Without Making Sacrifices?

There’s no escaping boring tasks. While we all do our best to fill our personal and professional lives with engaging activities, there are countless menial, yet critical tasks that keep our organizations running.Pairing boring work with a secondary task that requires more attention can be an effective strategy to boost engagement and thus persistence. This insight can help individuals, managers looking to help their teams stay on track, organizations looking to encourage healthy practices, and product designers looking to improve customer retention.

Boring Tasks Are Inevitable: The Key Takeaways

<ul><li>People can really only pay attention to so much at one time. </li><li>﻿Tangential immersion, when there are two tasks of differing cognitive loads to be done, seems to increase persistence while decreasing boredom.</li><li>Tangential immersion only increases persistence if the two tasks together occupy most of - but not more than - one's total attentional capacity.</li></ul>

Tangential Immersion Decreases Boredom and Increases Persistence

So how can individuals, managers, and organizations start leveraging the power of tangential immersion? Many people already demonstrate an intuitive understanding of this effect in their personal lives — for instance, listening to immersive music or podcasts while at the gym is a great example of real-world tangential immersion. But there are also a lot of workplace situations in which both employees and their managers might benefit from this approach.

Putting Tangential Immersion to Work

When it comes to menial office tasks, many employees use monitoring tools such as <a href="https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique">work timers</a> to increase their persistence. In other cases, managers might rely on incentives such as extra time off or bonuses to motivate their employees. And to be sure, strategies like these certainly have a place.For tasks that don’t require much attention, tangential immersion may be more effective. That could mean encouraging workers to listen to an audiobook while filing paperwork, watch a video while cleaning their desks, or read a news article while stuffing envelopes.

The Office Use Case

There’s no escaping boring tasks. Of course, we should all do what we can to fill our jobs and lives with engaging activities — but given the prevalence and importance of low-attention work in our personal and professional lives (and the lives of our employees and customers), we all stand to benefit from finding ways to persist in these behaviors. Tangential immersion offers a simple yet effective strategy that can empower anyone to stick with the work they know they should be doing, boosting personal productivity, organizational success, and well-being on a societal level.

The Bottom Line

While doing a boring task, pair it with something interesting.

There’s no escaping boring tasks. While we all do our best to fill our personal and professional lives with engaging activities, there are countless menial, yet critical tasks that keep our organizations running — and we only stand to benefit by finding ways to get better at doing them. In this article, the author describes how a concept called tangential immersion can help anyone persevere in a boring task: Through a series of studies with more than 2,000 participants, she and her coauthors found that people often quit boring tasks prematurely because they don’t take up enough of their attention to keep them engaged. As a result, pairing boring work with a secondary task that requires more attention can be an effective strategy to boost engagement and thus persistence. This has implications not only for individuals, but also more managers looking to help their teams stay on track, organizations looking to encourage healthy practices, and product designers looking to improve customer retention.

Research: How to Power Through Boring Tasks

You need to know what is on your plate and what you want to put first. First doesn't always mean you will get it finished first but it is a focus.

Prior

When working on stuff there's always something that is going to be holding up other things. This is the critical path and you need to make sure that you order your items accordingly so that you don't push off the critical path and prolong what you're working on.

Critical Path

When you're working on a project especially a long one it is better to take your time and do things right instead of rushing. You might miss certain details

Things Should Not Be Rushed

This is a stash about keeping in mind the bigger picture and not rushing when working on projects.

Not rushing

Who hasn't been overwhelmed by the many apps out there that sell themselves as the ultimate all-in-one tool? or Who hasn't been frustrated with the desire of finding a perfect app that will satisfy all the needs.If you are one of those, let me tell you I know how it feels. It is part of the journey, but if you are kinda lost in this messy world, the following apps may help you stay organized.REMINDER:Don't forget that it doesn't matter what app you use, your system needs to have at least these features:<ul><li>Task management and prioritization</li><li>Time Tracking Software</li><li>Schedule events</li></ul>

The best apps to build your productivity and time management sys

A task management app that allows you:<ul><li>To create categories, projects, and subtasks</li><li>To give your tasks a date, hour, and level of priority. So, you know exactly what you need to do each day, and which things can be done later.</li><li>To see statistics about your productivity </li></ul>Plus: It has an integration with Google Calendar so any task you do will appear in your calendar as an event.

Todoist

A time tracking app that will give you some insights into how you are spending your time. Plus: <ul><li>It has an integration with Google Calendar so all the events or activities that are already part of your schedule can sync with Toggl.</li><li>The integration with Todoist allows you to start tracking tasks directly from your to-do list.</li></ul>

Toggl

By far one of the best ways to plan ahead, add events, use time blocking, and see all the things you have been doing.<ul><li>It allows seeing all the activities you have in a day, week, month, and year view.</li><li>Quickly schedule meetings and events</li><li>Get reminders about upcoming activities.</li></ul>

Google Calendar

These are the only apps I am currently using as my productivity system. (Aside from Notion, which I use more as a note-taking app). After been compulsively using app by app trying to find the perfect one, I decide to stay with these 3 apps that for specific functions.

How to start when you have no idea where to start

Can You Get More Done Without Making Sacrifices?

Research: How to Power Through Boring Tasks

Not rushing

The best apps to build your productivity and time management system

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