Set your High Impact Tasks

If your goal in life is to complete all the tasks in your todo list, you can only fail. Your todo list is likely to grow faster than you can accomplish what's on it. So you need to pick your fights.

The High Impact Tasks (HITs) are the essence of the methodology. The High Impact Tasks represent all the tasks you deliberately choose to accomplish this week that will help you make progress towards your objectives or role vision. These tasks are the most important things you can work on this week.

What does important mean?

It means that it makes you make progress, as opposed to maintaining the status quo. "Paying a bill" for example allows you to manage your daily life, but next month, you will receive the same bill and you will have to pay it again. But if you decided to "automate bill payments", that would probably be classified as important, because it will free you up for other things and it will have long term impact.

Beat the game

If Week Plan was a game and you the player, to beat the game you must complete all the tasks in your Plan of the Week, week after week. We, the team creating Week Plan, are successful at what we do when most of our users complete their Plans of the Week.

Creating the High Impact Tasks list

The process of deciding what goes into your High Impact Tasks is very important because you want to make sure you work on the top most important tasks. 

If you have followed the onboarding process, you probably already have some plan and you can already start scheduling and working on some of the tasks.

For next week and the weeks after, we have streamlined the process of creating the High Impact Tasks list through the Weekly Review which we describe more in details in another article. People generally set 30 minutes aside at the end of the week (or at the very start) to plan ahead.

Put first things first

Once you have created your High Impact Tasks list through the Weekly Review, we suggest that you try to schedule some of your HITs into your schedule. This way, by blocking some time for it, you make sure nothing else will take its place. It will help you say No to other less important "opportunities".

Simply drag and drop the tasks into the day you want to get them done. You can even drop the tasks on the timeline next to the header of the day to set the time you want to work on it.

Warning: don't overdo it. Give yourself some slack, some tasks are better scheduled and some are better done when you have a moment, whenever.