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This is a guest-post from Kate Davis at Blog to Discovery, where she writes about her experiences with developing her own personal productivity practice. With this post she is looking for some advice on how to keep her task list from growing faster than she can execute it.

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for the last year or so, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who has a task list that never seems to get smaller. I’ve tweaked my system, moving from digital to paper and back to digital; I’ve incorporated new ideas from Getting Things Done and Do it Tomorrow, but the list keeps growing. So at the start of 2008 I decided to do some analysis so I could understand the nature of my incoming tasks and hopefully develop a system that means I can work through my task list.

Incoming Tasks

When I add an item to my task list I estimate how long the task will take as this helps me to plan my day and I have used this information to analyze the total time of incoming tasks from the beginning of January to the end of March 2008.

The first obvious feature is the variety in the time of incoming tasks, it is rarely a similar figure for two consecutive days. Ignoring the first data point which was my first day in the office after the Christmas holidays, the incoming time ranges from 0 to 7:55 hours of tasks. My contracted hours are 7:25 hours/day so initial appearances suggest it should be possible for me to complete my tasks on the majority of days, so maybe the variety is causing problems

Looking at it on a weekly basis (the graph shows the average total time of incoming tasks divided by the number of working days in the week) the graph is smoother showing there is less variety of tasks between weeks compared to between days. The two peaks both indicate when I’ve been out of the office for at least two weeks meaning work has built up in my absence. Again the maximum time of incoming tasks is below my contracted hours, suggesting I should be able to complete the incoming tasks in that week.

Results of Measuring the Tasks

This initial analysis does not answer that questions, so I need to do some further investigation; my initial thoughts are:

* too many meetings reducing the available working time
* underestimating the time required to complete the tasks
* too many interruptions
* not being focused e.g. breaking up work with web browsing or chatting
* not working effectively

I will continue with my analysis and hope to discover that my growing to do list is connected to the first three suggestions rather than the last two as I hope I’m already focussed and effective. However if it is either (or both) of the last two at least I will have identified the problem and can take action to improve my habits.

Have you identified what prevents you completing your tasks? What have you done to solve the problem?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5m9ys9. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen