A participant in a recent webinar asked me this very thoughtful question.
Is it worth capturing a task in your task list if it will only take twenty minutes?
We had been discussing the merits of capturing all meetings in your calendar and all priorities in your task list. I sensed that he was struggling with the potential inefficiency of investing the time to write smaller tasks down, rather than just doing them.
For me, the decision to capture something is not influenced by how long it will take. The task could take one minute or one hour – I will still write it down. The more critical question for me is:
Is the task worth doing?
If it is, and I cannot do it now, I capture it. Many of the things in my task list take twenty minutes (see my last newsletter on ). They are all actions that are worth capturing, and any inefficiency in doing this is made up for in my effectiveness in driving my next-step actions forward and achieving outcomes that have impact.