✅ How to prioritize your tasks

In today’s note-taking workflow, we’ll show you how to quickly and easily prioritize your tasks for the day.

This is a great exercise to do at the end of your day so you’re prepared for the next. You can even do it for the whole week on a Sunday. It sets you up for a pleasant and productive week.

Step 1: Do a mind dump of everything you need to accomplish

Just start listing things as they come to you. Don’t worry about the order or importance. If you suspect you may need to do it, write it down!

Use a simple bullet point list in a note dedicated to that day. You can also transcribe a voice note and have AI convert it into a bullet list for you.

List things until you can’t reasonably think of any more. This should give you some peace of mind that you’re not missing anything important. You can always add things later if they come to you.

Step 2: Convert each item to either a checkbox or task

You’ll want to divide your list into things that you must get done and things that you’d simply like to get done. For example, your unanswered emails might be able to wait a day or two. Onboarding a new hire cannot. Include your meetings as well.

If your note-taking app has a tasks section, you can mark these important action items as such. In Reflect, this can be done using the cmd + shift + return, or using a + sign followed by a space. These list items with circular tasks will then be added to a dedicated tasks tab.

If your note-taking app doesn’t have tasks, you can mark these with a unique emoji.

Step 3: Order your list by priority

Start organizing the items around in order of priority.

Ideally your note-taking tool let’s you easily drag and drop, or move things with a keyboard shortcut. If not, you can always just copy and paste them.

There are several ways you can prioritize your list. You might choose to keep the most important things on top, or list in the order you need to do them in. Experiment with both and see what results in a more productive day for you.

Step 4: Check them off as you go

You now have a simple flow for your day, marking items as complete as you work.

Inevitably, there will be things you don’t complete in a day. You can move those to the next day.

If you decide something doesn’t actually need to be done, you can cross it out instead of marking it complete. You could of course also delete it, but this way you’ll have a more detailed record of the decision you made.

💡 Tip: use a dedicated tasks page

If your note-taking app has a dedicated tasks section, you can manage all of your critical tasks from one location.

For example, you can add tasks in the future to give them due dates. When you miss one, it will be marked as “overdue”.

Additionally you can list tasks accross notes for things like projects and meetings. They’ll be saved with a label of that section.

You can watch a full video walkthrough of how to do this here on our YouTube page.