Ditch Your To-Do List and Use These Docs To Make More Impact

Are you overwhelmed by never-ending to-do lists? Discover a fresh approach to productivity with impactful documents. Let's explore how these tools can transform your daily grind into a more meaningful and efficient routine.

Take ownership over your work

Pick the right stuff to focus on, and then work your tail off to get it done

• The only thing that matters is the impact your work has on your company, your customers, your colleagues, and your professional development
• Stay on top of your higher-order goals by upholding the 30,000-foot perspective and getting the 3-inch-level work done

Snag Log

Cover things that bog you down instead of things that lift you up

• Get rid of the things that give you the “ickies” – things that make your stomach turn or make you want to throw your laptop out the window
• Identify patterns in your attitude towards work
• Have a short memory – many things feel like little snags at the time
• Be able to recall them later

Impact Tracking

Look at all the things you shipped and jot down notes about their impact

• Focus on observable outcomes such as what metrics moved and what users said or did as a result
• This will help you speak intelligently about the work you do and how it generates impact with others

Job Description

A typical job description has three components: overall description of the relationship between the role and the broader company and its goals, list of responsibilities, and skills that are required to do a great job

• When crafting your own, make sure the first paragraph has a memorable one-liner mission statement
• What you write doesn’t have to have any conception of your current skills or what the company needs. It’s all about you and where you want to go

“It’s Only The Weekend When” Post-It

Write down 3 things you would be very disappointed to go into the weekend without completing

• Place it on a post-it and move it around to different places throughout the week to make it easier to see what needs to be done

Working with Me

A way to express and scale your preferred working style and preferences.

• For leaders creating one, be conscious of the implicit power dynamics at play – specifically, whether you are expecting those who work with you to adapt their working style to yours to accommodate your preferences.

“What I’m Proud Of” Scrapbook

A collection of things I’m proud of

• It’s much less structured than the OSR but can provide a great raw data set for the things that give you energy and make you tick
• The relationship between work shipped and work proud is 1:1
• There are things I think I like doing but never appear in this document
• Things I didn’t think I cared about but really, really do

“Today, I Learned”

A list of things I learned, usually in bullet form

• Learnings range from technical details to storing things that I might want to find later
• Date them or batch them by month so you can look back and understand the timing and context
• It’s useful in my day-to-day work because it makes me less likely to ask the same question twice and helps me unblock myself
• When it comes to self-reflection, this document has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on what and how I’m learning, as well as the slope and rate of that learning

Putting It All Into Practice

Even when worklife is feeling its most chaotic, there are clues hiding in plain sight and patterns waiting to reveal themselves.

• When we do what it takes to uncover them, the work we produce gets a whole lot better and the journey feels a lot more rewarding. We can take it all into our own hands!

Ongoing Stack Rank (OSR)

A list of things you are working on or could be working on over a given time period.

• There are three critical features of a good OSR: show outputs only, include workstream status, order by priority, and impact and success measurement criteria for each input.

Me-Sat

C-Sat, short for customer satisfaction, is a metric for how satisfied customers are with a product or service

• Some ways to take your own pulse include: Satisfaction Litmus Test, Cherish / Change Retrospective, Contribute to Your “Four Lists,” Stop, Start, Continue Retrospective and Energy Assessment
• The most impactful things for me have been taking some time and space for self-reflection and looking backwards to identify patterns in a way that helps inform future behavior

Personal Press Release

Write a press release about all the things you shipped and the impact they are having

• Include a one-line summary, top 3-5 things shipped, progress on metrics, feedback you received from stakeholders/users, and one piece of art
• Time-box these to 3 hours max
• Look ahead to see what you’re shipping next

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