Getting started

Bossit’s an early stage start up with the ambition of helping you develop your professional and personal life skills.

The long-term plan is to do this using bitesize lessons, over audio, in core leadership skills delivered through a mobile app.

It will address topics such as productivity, communication, resilience, coaching, building relationships, team management, problem-solving, etc.

It will offer short bursts of insights, tactical tips and tricks, questions to consider and activities to try. We’ll ask you to do something or reflect on something in order to get you to consider the way you approach tasks, people and problems.

The lessons are bitesize, taking about 10 minutes each day and leveraging what you’re already working on in your day to day, to help you improve immediately and with minimal overhead on your time and energy.

A series of sessions on a given topic will progress incrementally, building off of the previous session, to help you form habits and make it easier to retain what you learn.

We welcome you to try out as many of the topics as you deem relevant. The cadence we suggest is once you start a series, that you listen to a session every work day unless otherwise advised.

We would greatly appreciate it if you’d be willing to provide feedback on a series by completing an online survey. The survey has 10 questions and would take less than 3 minutes to complete. The relevant link can be found in the Episode Web Page link of every final session in a given series.

Thanks for listening and we hope that you find Bossit useful to developing yourself as a better business leader.

Actioning your tasks

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By blocking time on the calendar to do a task, without interruption, it is possible to do the task with greater efficiency. It might also stop you from mindlessly accepting calendar invites to fill the time.

However, it’s best not to block out your entire day - it’s worth having some cushion time in your calendar for overruns or unanticipated tasks and challenges that arise.

Having a ‘done list’ which lists all accomplishments and tasks you have completed, and not just the tasks on your list, can help boost your energy.

That brings us to the end of our series on task management. Capturing, Defining, Sorting, Reviewing and now finally Actioning. Don’t forget, following the system explicitly is what will offer the true value and keeping a routine will make it easier. Best of luck with it.

Reviewing all of your lists

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The purpose of reviewing is to ensure you stay aware of everything you have to-do, so that you can suitably prioritise and stay in control.

It’s helpful to get into a routine for when and how you review all of your different lists.

When it comes to your Calendar, it’s helpful to check this at the start of every day because it helps you to understand what you have to do in totality.

When it comes to your To-Do list, it’s helpful to review this everyday, normally several times. It’s worth reviewing every time you complete a to-do, in order to scratch it off your list and maintain a clear picture of what’s still on your plate.

You can help ensure effective prioritisation by involving others in the decision making. It can help to ask your team (if you have one) or people who know you well to look over your to-do list and share their perspective on whether they feel your prioritisation is right.

The frequency at which you review your your Waiting list will depend on the way you delegate or the kind of occurrences you might be waiting on. For some people they’ll check once a week, others every day, others maybe multiple times in a day.

Add deadlines to tasks you’ve delegated and order the list by the tasks that are due soonest.

Review the Someday list every few weeks.

Your activity today is to spend 5 minutes not only reviewing your calendar and your lists but also coming up with a routine to ensure regular review.

Re-prioritising as the day evolves

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The plan you have at the start of the day isn’t necessarily the plan you’ll follow, or even want to follow as the day goes on. New tasks are bound to pop up as you’re busy trying to deal with the ones already on your list.

You can re-prioritise by repeating the stages of capturing, defining and sorting. However, we need a way to find some kind of balance between re-prioritising and simply getting on with things.

Try being disciplined and exposing yourself to new requests less frequently. This would mean checking emails, voicemails and texts less frequently and only at set intervals.

Use a more simple and flexible to-do list, which is easier to adapt, making re-prioritisation faster, such as post-it notes.

Agree specific working norms with the sources of your tasks, namely the people you work with. e.g., they can only interrupt you at set times.

Build additional time buffer into your day when you process in the morning, anticipating that more will come your way as the day goes on.

Your activity for today is to try out some of these techniques, re-prioritising regularly throughout the day to ensure you are maintaining an up-to date, relevant to-do list.

Sorting through your to-dos

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Sorting involves categorising, grouping and ordering your tasks, which will help us to decide what task we should complete, when.

Examples of categories people often use to group tasks by are:

Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes thinking about how you work, what kind of categorisation is most relevant to you, then start drawing up your template or editing your task manager in a way that cuts your tasks by your most relevant categories, so you can better figure out what should be done when.

Prioritising your tasks

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Very often, urgent tasks make the most noise and grab the most attention, making it harder to ignore them or focus on other things but it’s the importance of something to you that matters most when assessing the priority of your tasks.

So you need to ask yourself the question, how important is this to me and why?

Your activity for today is to spend 5 minutes reviewing the tasks you have on your list and ask yourself the question, how important is this task to me?

Be critical and intentional about removing things that aren’t actually important and only then assess their urgency.

You need to be disciplined and pragmatic here - you can only have so many priorities. When you have too many, nothing becomes a priority and it defeats the purpose of doing this in the first place.

Defining the outcomes and next steps

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Your activity for today is to get your inboxes together and process them in one go, ideally without any distractions or interruptions.

Ask yourself these questions:

For all of your tasks define them clearly with:

For tasks on your To-Do list, add:

Capturing your tasks

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There are two broad methods to capturing your tasks.

The first is capturing what’s already stuck in your head by performing a mindsweep. You want to empty every single item from your head that your mind considers incomplete and record it in a list, that you always keep to hand.

The second method is to capture them as they arise, before they settle in your mind. These tend to collect in places such as email, text, and voicemail inboxes.

However, you want a “parking-lot” list always to hand where you can capture tasks that don’t have pre-assigned inboxes - such as for recording tasks that arise in meetings / conversation.

Your activity for today is to spend 5-10 minutes performing a mindsweep, capturing all the tasks that are lurking in your brain.

What is it

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In this series we’ll be defining a structured approach to help you get a firmer grip on what you have to do, helping you to become more productive and more balanced.

The system breaks down into 5 stages:

Your activity for today is to spend 3 minutes identifying and logging the different sources of where your tasks generally come from. Examples are emails, texts, voicemails, meetings and conference calls, conversations with your boss, letters, things your family asks you.

Communicating it effectively and learning from it

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Now that you’ve made a decision, it’s likely that you’ll have to take action of some kind in order to implement it, so being clear on the decision with yourself and with others is crucial to its success.

Your task for today is to spend 5-10 minutes: