(I should note that this is not a sys­tem that I use, and not one that I have really ever heard detailed out. I wanted to share this method for peo­ple who want a quick and dirty way to get started on productivity.)

Any­one who has ever attended busi­ness school can prob­a­bly tell you that they are taught when giv­ing bad news to sand­wich bad news between two pos­i­tive things. You will prob­a­bly notice that most man­agers try to do this and it helps to keep peo­ple feel­ing good about them­selves. We can apply the same think­ing to task man­age­ment by sub­sti­tut­ing good for easy and bad for hard.

The sand­wich to-do method then would be as easy as accom­plish­ing one easy to-do fol­lowed by a hard to-do and back to an easy one, rinse and repeat.

The pur­pose of the method then is not about get­ting more done in less time. Rather it is all about get­ting the hard things done. It would be easy to run through your list and do all the easy stuff. We only pro­cras­ti­nate on the hard / bor­ing stuff. Not allow­ing your­self to do the easy tasks until you com­plete one of the hard ones is a great way to start tick­ing off the dif­fi­cult tasks.

Related posts:

• Doing Your Best Not to Get Lost
• On Hin­der­ances to Productivity.
• 6 Steps to Cre­ate a Bet­ter Task List