Now we are geting somewhere. You have made your To Do List, you have allocated tasks to people, ranked your tasks in importance, and now you need to look at how much time each task may take. Something like phoning for an appointment may take a short length of time, but redesigning a room may take much longer - days even. Don’t make this complicated, allocate each task a 1, 2 or 3 in terms of time to do, - 1 being the shortest amount of time, 3 being the longest.
Go with your gut instinct on this, its just a guide. If you need to add a fourth type, go ahead. Perhaps 1 is minutes, 2 is a morning, 3 is a day and 4 is multiple days. Whatever works for you.
You know what to do next…reorganise your tasks again into their time allocations. All short items together and so on. You leave the tasks that other people are doing to them to organise as they wish. But you may want to put a timeframe on them, when do you want them to be completed. Let them tell you if this is not doable.
You now have a list of your tasks, with approximate lengths of time to complete and their importance. You are now ready to start planning them into your life.
Remember these 3 choices every time you want to add a task to your list, do YOU have to do this, how Important is it and how long will it take. This will make planning new tasks easier in the future.
We are all bad at estimating time, so always add a buffer at the start. You will get better as you go along, so don’t worry about it. Below is an article on why we are so bad at estimates and some tips on what to do to improve.