Make a Friday punch list

How to keep little tasks from taking over your life

The more I study people’s work schedules, the more I see how important it is to match the right work to the right time.

If you tackle a challenging task when you feel energized and focused, you can get it done. If you try to tackle the challenging task when you’re tired, or when you know you’re going to get interrupted, it probably won’t get done — or if it does, it will take a lot longer than it could have.

And yet many people don’t really think about this with their work days. We tend to tackle little tasks whenever they occur to us or, worse, at the start of the day to “clear the decks.” Then we run out of energy before we get to anything weighty!

Fortunately, there’s a more strategic way to deal with non-urgent tasks, to keep them from crowding out deeper work.

Lessons from a construction site

I have now lived through two major home renovations. Toward the end of each project, the manager would create a “punch list” of little things that still needed to get tackled. The idea was to get to as many of these tasks as possible in one fell swoop, rather than send a crew to the site multiple times.

I’ve now adopted this tactic for my work. During the week, I create a “Friday punch list” of non-urgent tasks that won’t take much time each, but do need to get done. This is generally stuff like scheduling interviews that won’t happen for several weeks, signing kids up for activities or camps, paying bills, making hotel reservations or buying plane tickets, doing an email triage where I respond to non-urgent messages, etc.

When a task comes up or occurs to me, I put it on the list. Then, on Friday, I take some time to plow through all of them. If you, like me, enjoy crossing things off a list, I can attest that it is enormously satisfying to cross off a dozen things in short order!

Preserving focus

Of course, the reason the construction managers created a punch list was not to enjoy crossing things off (even if they did). It’s so they could assign crews for bigger amounts of time to bigger projects, rather than having them run around for little jobs.

It’s the same with other kinds of work. If you have an unclaimed morning during a workday, it’s better to spend that time on a bigger project than to start the project, remember you need to fill out that form for HR, do that, come back to the project, remember you need to set up that meeting with Bob for two weeks from now, send that request, come back to the project, then remember that you needed to approve that invoice, send Jill those training materials, and confirm that you can be at that lunch next Friday. Those things all have to happen, but not right then.

So make a Friday punch list. Preserve focused time for bigger things, and then tackle the little things during a lower energy time when crossing them off might feel more motivational. It really is the best of both worlds.