Bring Sanity to Your To-Do List With the 1-3-5 Rule

“Here’s the gist: On any given day, assume that you can only accomplish one big thing, three medium things, and five small things, and narrow down your to-do list to those nine items.” – The 1-3-5 Rule

Prioritizing work is like making a sandwich; everyone does it slightly differently and everyone thinks they know best. If your go-to strategy hasn’t been working recently or you’ve never settled on a way to prioritize the multitude of things you have to do in a day, you should try the 1-3-5 rule.

The basic idea is that you pick 1 “big” task, 3 “medium” tasks, and 5 “little” tasks to accomplish in a day. One of the biggest causes of work stress is dealing with long-term projects that suddenly end up behind schedule because they were never urgent enough to get on your radar. By prioritizing ahead of time and making sure some of those long-term projects that just love to go forgotten get on the list you can make major strides in reducing your stress at work.

At the very least, you’ll know what to work on each day and 9 tasks a day, every day, is a whole lotta forward progress.

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