How do you decide which tasks you tackle first on your to-do list? If you're choosing based solely on priority, your system is probably breaking down on a regular basis, according to father of GTD David Allen. Here's how to set up your list so "priority" isn't just something else on your list to ignore.

Why Hard-Coding Priority Doesn't Work

Priorities change too often to be set in stone when you add a new item to your to-do list, and inflexible priorities don't take the human element into account. But you have to arrange your to-dos in some kind of order, right?

In an interview with GTD Times, productivity guru David Allen explains that we should all stop organizing our to-do lists strictly by priority. He doesn't say you should throw the concept of priority out the window entirely, just that the way we think about it breaks down entirely too easily. Here's why:

• Organizing your to-dos by priority "codes" like "A, B, C" or "High, Medium, Low" creates an inflexible system that can't adapt.
• A "red" priority item at 8am can easily become a "green" priority item at noon—setting the priority as soon as you add an item ignores the fact that priorities change, sometimes within hours.
• Assigning priorities or flags to to-dos strictly by deadline or when you get the work completely ignores the times of day when you're most productive.
• Setting priority based entirely on deadline ignores the time required to do the work.

The crux of Allen's argument is that your priorities at 4pm are bound to be different than they were at 8am, so why should your to-do list be set in stone at 8am? If at the end of the day you're tired and want to go home, no red flag will make you ready to tackle your next big project, so why can't your to-do list reflect the times of day when you do your best work? Sure, you can move your priorities around over the course of the day, but that forces you to spend time managing your to-do list—one of the cardinal sins of productivity. You don't want to waste time organizing work rather than doing work. Photo remixed from doglikehorse.

Redefine "Priority" to Include More Variables

So what's the solution? Change the way you think about "priority." Make sure that when you organize your list, you don't just do it in terms of what you were assigned first and when it needs to be done. Instead, arrange your to-dos based on your daily schedule and your peak productivity times, in addition to when they need to be completed. Allen puts it this way:

The four criteria that you will use to decide what to do are (in order of precedence):

• Context (what can I do where I am?)
• Time (when do I have to do something else?)
• Energy (how wasted/fresh am I?)
• Priority (what has the highest payoff for me if I do it?)

So for example, you get an email from your boss at 10am to look into a server problem. The server is across the country, and poking around now will disrupt the people using it. Your boss says it's important, but you know that the server is only in use once a week. So now you have to decide when you're going to look at the issue. Photo by FuzzBones.

You can't do the work now, but if you're most productive in the evenings, you might want to tackle it later in the day, after everyone's logged off. The highest payoff for you would be to get the work done quickly, but if the server is only in use every week, so you can probably schedule the work for tomorrow, or in the evening, when you can work freely and you're energized. Had you just added the item to your to-do list with an "A" priority because it's urgent, it would sit next to all of the other "A" items and force you to re-prioritize every time you look at your to-dos. Allen's method takes more thought, but it results in a more concrete plan.

How do you prioritize your to-dos? What things do you take into account? Share your tips in the comments below.

Title photo by R/DV/RS.

It's no secret that the bulk of people take on more work than they can accomplish in a given week. It's a confidence thing because at the beginning of a week we feel like we can do it all but by the end we have no interest in all those errands. Productivity blogger Scott Young suggests the best way to avoid this is to simply embrace your weaknesses and stop littering your to-dos with things you're not going to do.

In Young's case it was recognizing that he can be a bit lazy and planning around that. He explains:

Instead of trying to change every behavior at once, I would pick something incredibly small and simple and focus on it for an entire month. Even that can be difficult, but it meant I could make a change almost habitual before I tried something else.

In my short-term to-do lists and projects I strive to be modest. My agenda is usually far less ambitious than my friends, even in cases where my track record is better than theirs.

We all have different weaknesses. Consider your weakness when making your schedule or to-dos and you might find you're able to get more done.

The Laziness Paradox: Embrace Your Weakness to Accomplish More | Scott H. Young

Photo by Paul Pival.

You have a busy life and a to-do list a mile long. Unfortunately simply adding a new task to your to-do list doesn't actually mean it'll get done. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get out in front of your to-dos at work and at home, always know what's on your plate, and even have a little time to think about how you can work smarter instead of slaving away every day? You can, and it's easy to do: you just need to incorporate a weekly review into your schedule.

What Is a Weekly Review?

Simply put, the weekly review is a set-aside period every week, usually an hour or two, where you dedicate yourself to getting organized for the week ahead and ensure that nothing is slipping through the cracks. We'll get to how later, but the important thing to remember is that the review is time reserved for you to be an executive of your personal and professional life, organize your tasks, make lists of people you need to follow up with, and arrange your priorities so you're always working on the things that are actually important. Photo by David Chico Pham.

This also means that you shouldn't spend your review time actually working. This is your time to step back, connect with your work, and act like an executive—the CEO of a company of one. During your review, it's important that you—like any good manager—set the priorities, not micro-manage.

David Allen, the creator of the popular Getting Things Done productivity technique and proponent of the weekly review, has said that if you're not doing a weekly review, you're not really following GTD. Of course, you don't need to follow GTD to take advantage of the weekly review; all you need is a desire to get a better handle on your work and life.

The weekly review is supposed to help you do three things: get clear, get current, and get creative.

• Get Clear. Take some time to clean up your workspace and empty your inbox. Then, review your projects. Which are most important? Which ones have milestones coming up in the following week? Organize them by priority and urgency so when you start next week, you'll know what to start without having to think about it.
• Get Current. Look at your calendar. Perhaps next week you have a big meeting with your boss about a big software upgrade, but you forgot to call the vendor to get the details. Put that call on the calendar for next week, and give yourself enough time to research before your meeting with your boss. Finally, check your mail for anyone you may be waiting on input from. Make notes or appointments to check in with them next week.
• Get Creative. Look at those projects you've always wanted to get to, like redesigning your personal web site, and think about what small parts of those projects you might be able to slip into your schedule. Think about how you can be more efficient—maybe you're a sysadmin and there's a new tool that will cut down on the time you spend each week pushing patches to your servers. Take some time to get out in front of your life, instead of sitting in the passenger seat.

First Things First: Put It On The Calendar

Pick a day that works for you—whether it's the end of the week, or the day after a big weekly event that you have to deal with at work—and put your weekly review on the calendar for the end of the day. If you wait until you have your whole weekly review planned out and ready to go, you'll never do it. Ideally, you'll want to make it the last thing you do that day, and schedule it for a good hour or two. Photo by Joe Lanman.

I scheduled my weekly reviews for Friday at 5pm, and stretched them out until 7pm, when I normally left the office. It sounds like a long time, but you'll only need that time when you get started and have a lot to go over. With time and practice, you may even get your weekly review down to 30 minutes. It's not impossible, and hey—if you finish early, you can go home early, right? Either way, get it on the calendar, and the rest will follow.

Build Your Checklist

A weekly review checklist is an essential tool to making sure you touch on all three of the pillars mentioned above. Here's what a basic review checklist looks like, courtesy of GTD Times: Photo by Karuka (Shutterstock).

Get Clear

• Collect loose papers and materials
• Get Inbox to zero
• Empty your head

Get Current

• Review Action Lists
• Review past calendar data
• Review upcoming calendar
• Review Waiting For list
• Review Project (and larger outcome) lists
• Review any relevant checklists

Get Creative

• Review Someday/Maybe
• Be creative and courageous

If you need more detail, David Allen offers a template checklist (free, but requires registration) on his site to get you started, and this one (scroll down to weekly review) is another good example. On the GTD forums, some users have shared their own checklists for inspiration. Whether you use a template or build yours from scratch (and it doesn't have to be long—just those things you want to make sure you do every week), make sure you populate it with things you want to review and not do. Remember, you're not supposed to spend time working during your weekly review—just reviewing.

My checklist is highly customized to my activities, and even if you start with a template, yours should be as well. If you don't work with paper, for example, there's no reason for you to spend time every week cleaning up your desk. Also, don't forget to include your personal activities in your weekly review—are you renovating your house? Planning to redecorate your apartment? Get those items on your checklist as well so you don't forget to check in on their progress as well.

Try a Trigger List

If you're having a hard time building a checklist, you may consider using a "trigger list" to jog your memory each week. The trigger list is just a long list of items you should scan during your weekly review to make sure you didn't forget anything. It's designed to trigger your memory and help you remember something you may have forgotten. We mentioned how you can use a trigger list for school and personal projects, and productivity guru Merlin Mann published this one at 43Folders a long time ago for professional projects.
To build your own trigger list, just copy and paste the templates, remove anything that doesn't make sense, and start brainstorming projects and areas of your life that might need a little follow up. Then just add them to the trigger list. As with your checklist, don't forget to add your personal life as well—your PTA commitments, community group, family events, even work-life balance and social events. The last thing you want is for your personal and social commitments to pile up while you spend time organizing your professional life. To build on the "CEO of one" analogy, think of yourself as the CEO of your whole life—not just the CEO of your job. They may be different divisions of the same company, but if one fails, they all fail.

Walk Through Your Review

When your weekly review is scheduled to begin, get in the mood. Get up, take a quick walk around your desk or office. Grab a cup of coffee or refill your water bottle. Make sure you're jazzed for it—you're about to close the books on your week, it should be a happy occasion! When you get back to your desk, put on your headphones, steer clear of any distractions, fire up your favorite song or a playlist (in fact, at the GTD forums, a number of users have "weekly review theme songs") and get started. Photo by Dan Foy.

Stick to your checklist. If you've built it with the three pillars in mind—clear, current, and creative—you should have a simple set of to-dos in front of you. Tidy up your inbox. If you're not sure how, consider emptying your inbox with the trusted trio. Add any actionable appointments or responsibilities to your calendar. Fire up your to-do app and clear out anything you've already done, and add new to-dos that come to mind. Finally, round out your review with the creativity items on your checklist—whether it's research, talking to other people you want to learn from, or just sitting with a cup of tea thinking about how you can work smarter and not harder.

Make Sure You're Reviewing and Not Doing

One common trap that people fall into when trying a weekly review is that they spend too much time actually doing things instead of reviewing them. If you hear someone say the weekly review only works for a small number of tasks, or that their weekly review takes hours upon hours, the problem may be that instead of scheduling a time to call that software vendor back, you're actually taking time out of your review to call them. Don't fall into that trap—it's tempting to do it now and get it off your plate, but a rule of thumb is that if the to-do takes more than 2 minutes to accomplish, stop and schedule it or put it in your to-do manager.

What a Real Weekly Review Looks Like in Action

I use a checklist and a trigger list every week for my review, and it's scheduled every Friday afternoon. Working with a team that spans time zones can make it a challenge, but the important thing is that you try to schedule it for a time when you won't have any distractions or interruptions. My weekly review is usually about an hour, and here's how it plays out: Photo by Lisa Yarost.

• 0-15 minutes: Clean up email/paper notes. Interview notes, new contacts, and emails I want to follow up on all get filed. If there's a message I can fire a response to in a minute or two, I'll respond, but nothing that requires research.
• 15-45 minutes: Review ideas, projects, calendar appointments. This is where I spend the bulk of my time. I look through my idea bank (stored in Wunderlist, which I mentioned last week), trash anything stale, add new ideas, and assign dates where I can. I head over to my to-do app (ReQall, another tool I love), clear out old and completed tasks, and add new or follow-up items based on my calendar, assignments, and trigger list.
• 45-60 minutes: Brainstorming. This is where I head back to my idea bank and start brainstorming topics I want to write or learn more about, items in the news that are worth investigating, and personal projects that need my attention.

Reap the Benefits

My weekly review is scheduled for an hour—it used to be two when I was a project manager—and it usually takes me about 45 minutes, give or take a cup of tea. It took some time to get used to, but I learned that when you take time to step back and reconnect with the things you have to do and why you have to do them, you begin to understand what's really important, what you really have time for, what you need help with, and how much bandwidth you actually have. You'll finally be able to respond to your boss when they ask you "So what's on your plate," without fudging the answer, and you'll know for fact whether you have time to help your neighbor with their landscaping project next weekend. Photo by wetwebwork.

Most people consider the weekly review a difficult thing to start, but it doesn't have to be. Hopefully, with these tools it's a bit easier to get into the habit, and once you're in it, you'll find the benefits will pop up all over your life. You'll be more organized, you'll never wonder if there's something you forgot to do or something you should be working on, and you'll never be afraid you forgot about something important. You'll be in control, and with that control comes the flexibility to accept changes as they happen.

Do you have a weekly review on the books? How long is it? Do you follow a checklist, or do something different? Share your techniques in the comments below.

Photo by Steve Cukrov .

Ideas aren't tasks, but for some reason, many of us manage our ideas alongside our to-do lists. Wunderkit, on the other hand, gives you a platform specifically for managing your ideas. It's a great idea bank—or a place for all of your projects, goals, and the things that come out of your brainstorming sessions that you catch yourself wishing you could remember later.

Wunderkit is made by the same people who built Wunderlist, our pick for best to do app for OS X, Windows, and Linux. If you're familiar with Wunderlist, Wunderkit will feel very similar. If not, don't worry—it's very intuitive. The service gives you a workspace to arrange your ideas and projects into separate projects, tag them, assign due dates to them, and even bring in other people to help you. I have a few gripes (we'll get to those later), I trust it as my brainstorming tool and my personal well of ideas, and I think you should too.

Why Wunderkit?

I tried getting into Wunderlist to manage my to-dos, but I never really found myself really using it every day. I already had a great to-do tool. I didn't need an app to remind me to remind me to file a TPS report every Monday; I needed something to hold all of my ideas: Future Lifehacker posts, my bucket list, and all of my personal projects and goals. Here's why Wunderkit is a fantastic tool for this:

• It keeps your ideas neatly organized. Part of what sets Wunderkit aside from other to-do apps is the fact that you can have different boards for different projects, each with their own sets of tags, due dates, and ideas, and none of them intrude on the other (unless you want them to.) For example, I have boards for "big brainstorm" ideas for large projects, article ideas, household projects, tech projects, and so on. Inside each of those boards, I have individual lists, ideas, and to-dos, all tagged and organized even further. From there, you can filter them so you only see the ones you're interested in at any time.
• It's fast. Wunderkit is primarily a webapp, but it's also available as a standalone app for iOS and OS X. The tool itself is fast enough, but what we really mean is that adding ideas and tagging them is as easy as typing a few words. It has tons of keyboard shortcuts, and almost every action is a keystroke away.
• It keeps your ideas in sync. If you use the OS X app (which is essentially a container for the web site), the iOS app, or the webapp, you'll notice they're always in sync. Your to-dos, tags, notes, even any custom icons or wallpapers for your workspaces are synchronized in the background, and available on any device with a web browser.
• It's free. Wunderkit is free—and always will be, according to the developers. The Wunderkit team will eventually offer premium features in the future, but everything here now will always be available for free. The mobile apps are also free, with no in-app purchases or other "pay more to get this tool that actually makes it useful" tricks up their sleeve.

Part of the reason Wunderkit works so well may be because it's not trying to replace your standard to-do app. It's smooth and easy to use, but it's not a calendar or reminder app, and it doesn't want to be. Some people will just consider it another app they have to have open to stay organized, but if you're using Wunderkit as a place to store your ideas—not your to-dos—you only have to look at it when you're ready to take those ideas and start working on them.

Organize Your Ideas and Projects with Wunderkit

Getting started with Wunderkit is easy. Sign up for an account (or link your Facebook or Twitter account) and you'll land on your dashboard. The dashboard gives you an overall picture of what to-dos you have in-progress and which ones you've completed, along with any other recent activity, like freshly added notes or tag changes. Let's say you want to plant a garden, now that the weather is turning warm. Create a new workspace for your garden by clicking "create new workspace" in the left sidebar. You can even upload and assign a photo of a plant or flower to your workspace so you can tell at a glance what it's for. From there, you can dive right in and start adding the to-dos required to get your garden up and running.

For example, you'll probably want to research what grows well in your area, make your shopping list, and then shop around at different nurseries to get the best prices on what you want to grow. Add each of these as to-dos for your project. Since your shopping list might get long, you may want to tag that to-do with "shopping," and then use the Notes section to build your shopping list out and include things like soil, fertilizer, pesticides, some fencing to keep the dogs out, and of course, the plants or seeds themselves. Tag your note with "shopping," and both the note and your to-do will appear if you do a search or filter for shopping tags later.

If you want to organize ideas or to-dos even more discretely, you can star them to mark their importance, heart them to indicate favorites, and sort them into individual lists inside of a workspace. I've found that tags and stars are sufficient, but it's nice to have the option. You can also assign due-dates to any of your ideas, and when it's time to work on them, they'll appear in the "What To Do" panel at the bottom left of the screen (indicated by a check-mark.)

Wunderkit doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that some to-do apps have, but it shouldn't be judged based on a checklist of features that you may or may not use. What makes Wunderkit really useful, in this writer's opinion, is how easy it is to add and organize your ideas, retrieve them when you want to review a specific tag or project, and how good you feel when you click that checkbox and see your idea join the others you've completed at the bottom of the screen. You don't spend a lot of time digging through ideas and adding new projects in Wunderkit—you dive in for a little brainstorming or something to do, mark them complete, and feel good about doing your work. That's a wonderful thing.

Use Wunderkit to Collaborate and Share with Others

Up to this point, we've discussed how easy it is to organize your thoughts in Wunderkit, and that's by far its strongest suit. However, the app has a collaborative dimension that's useful if you work on projects with groups, especially if you can convince them to sign up. If you want to bring in someone else on a workspace, you can invite them via email, or select from your Facebook friends or Twitter followers (if you've linked your account with one of those services.) As soon as they sign up and you grant them access, you can assign them to-dos, get their feedback on your ideas or get them to help you organize, and you can see their activity on your dashboard.

For example, one of my workspaces is exclusively ideas for articles and features to write here at Lifehacker. When Adam Pash comes calling, asking if I have ideas for a feature next week or a post tomorrow, instead of trying to brainstorm on the spot, or pull specific ideas out of my list that I think he might support, I can invite him to view my workspace and weigh in on the ideas he thinks has legs. Similarly, if I need help researching some of those ideas, I can invite one of our interns to my workspace and assign one of my ideas to him so he it appears on his dashboard. When he's finished, he can update the task, I'll see it on my dashboard, and I can start writing.

This is especially useful if you're collaborating on the same ideas with someone else, or if you have someone who needs to see what's on your plate, like a manager or supervisor who can help you prioritize all of those ideas you've added to your workspaces. Wunderkit's real power is in helping you organize your own activities, but it's really nice to give someone else a window to what you're working on and get their feedback from time to time.

Not a To-Do List, an Idea Well

Wunderkit is a platform, and the developers behind it say more tools and built-in "apps" like the dashboard, tasks, and notes are on the way soon. Even without them, it's a powerful tool for organizing your ideas and creating a constantly growing well of creative ideas.

It's not perfect; you can't link notes with to-dos (but you can tag them so a quick search will pull up any relevant notes as well as to-dos you want to see), and I wish it could sync with my calendar for alerts or reminders. Even so, it still complements the to-do app I already use, and I think it'll work well with yours, too. If you need a to-do app that will pop up a reminder that you have to do a certain thing at a certain time, Wunderkit isn't that app right now—it may develop some of those features in the future, but its real strength is in how it complements those traditional tools as an bank or well of ideas that's quick and easy to update as soon as a new one pops into your head.

Do you use Wunderkit? What do you think of it, and what do you use it for? Share your experiences in the comments below.