I have tried various approaches to managing the goals, projects, and tasks in my life and I find that effectively managing those tasks is what keeps me sane at work. Outside of work, effective task management also helps me to stay on top of my goals, projects, and responsibilities.

What I am going to talk about in this article is using a master tasks list and daily action plans. These two tools help me to manage myself every day, and if you adopt these strategies in your life, you too can be more organized and effective in managing the goals, projects, and tasks in your life outside of work.

✅Master Tasks List

For more than 19 months now I have been using daily action plans. These are daily to-do lists that outline what I commit to achieving every day. This is a powerful tool which we will discuss in this article, but an even more important tool that I have adopted more recently is a master tasks list.

In agile project management, you work in iterations, also called sprints. The work done in each sprint is pulled from a backlog of tasks, called the product backlog. You could even call this a master tasks list. I believe having such a list of tasks is a great way to manage your life.

So, what does a master tasks list look like? It is a list of everything you need or want to do but have not scheduled yet. It can be a dumping ground for ideas and tasks that you want to act on in the future.

How do you use a master tasks list? Start by creating a list of everything you need or want to do. This becomes the backlog of tasks you plan to work on.

After you have your initial backlog of tasks, you are not done. You must add to this list over time whenever a new goal, responsibility, or task comes up. Basically, it is your main task list that captures everything you plan to work on in the future.

So why should you use a master tasks list? The answer is that it becomes an extension of your memory that helps you remember to do everything you need or want to do. Getting it out of your head and onto to paper (or into an app on your phone) will ensure you don’t forget to do it. Assuming of course that you regularly review your master tasks list.

⚠️A word of warning. Your master tasks list can be overwhelming if you keep adding to it and never complete any of the tasks on your list. This is where daily action plans come into play.

✅Daily Action Plans

Once you have a master tasks list, which is the backlog of work you plan to do, you need a system to get that work done, otherwise your master tasks list will become unmanageable. This is why you need to adopt a system of scheduling the tasks on your backlog, and then working on your scheduled tasks.

Creating and following through on daily action plans is how you can manage your master tasks list. What you do is to schedule tasks from your backlog throughout the week, creating daily to-do lists for each day of the week. These are the tasks you commit to work on during the week.

You can remove a task from your master tasks list and put it on a to-do list for a specific day. Then, when that day arrives, you do the tasks you scheduled for that day, and you can mark those tasks as completed at the end of the day.

A key aspect of a daily action planning system is to have a review session at the end of each day, as well as a weekly planning session every Sunday. Your daily review session is when you review your action items from the day and mark them as completed. If any tasks you scheduled for the day were incomplete, you put them back on your master tasks list or you move them to the to-do list for a future date. This is how you can ensure those tasks still get done.

During your daily review is also when you check your daily action plan for tomorrow and add or remove tasks to tomorrow’s to-do list based on your changing circumstances. This allows you to adjust your plan based on any changes to your life that happened during the day. For example, if your priorities have changed, you can update tomorrow’s to-do list based on those changed priorities.

I also recommend a weekly planning session every Sunday where you create your daily action plans for the coming week. This means identifying all of the tasks from your master tasks list that you will work on for the next 7 days, Monday through Sunday.

When you create your to-do lists for the coming week you can write them down on a notebook or in a calendar. You could also use an app like ClickUp to track your tasks. I like using ClickUp because you can group tasks by due date. This allows me to assign a date to each task and see my tasks listed for each day of the coming week. I simply assign the due date for each task to be the date that I will work on that task.

Each morning you can check your daily action plan for that day to see the to-do list of tasks that you have committed to completing on that day. Then you proceed to doing those tasks during the day and marking them completed as you do them.

Conclusion

In agile project management, you work in iterations and have a backlog of tasks. A subset of those tasks gets assigned to each iteration, which could be anywhere from one week to four weeks. This helps you to manage the work for a project, and we can adjust our personal lives to adapt agile project management processes to the way we manage the goals, projects, and tasks in our lives.

You do this by maintaining a master tasks list. This is like having a product backlog for your life. Everything you need or want to do goes on this backlog of tasks, and having this master tasks list helps to ensure you remember to do everything you need and want to do.

Your master tasks list is made manageable by having daily action plans. This is where you pick the tasks from your master tasks list that you are going to work on, and schedule them on daily to-do lists throughout the week. This is like having iterations in your personal life where you work on a subset of your master tasks list during the week.

Using both of these strategies – a master tasks list and daily action plans – will make you much more organized and will help you to master the goals, projects, and responsibilities in your life. My challenge to you is to use both of these systems. I have been doing this for more then 19 months. It has become a habit and standard way of doing things for me. I encourage you to do the same.