Hack Your To-Do List // Productivity Tip For Moms
Today I’m sharing a to-do list “hack” that has helped me a lot over the years.
If you’re struggling with productivity even when you make a to-do list, this is a practical strategy that can help you truly accomplish what you need to!
**Note: click HERE or scroll down to the bottom of this post if you’d prefer to watch this tip in video format!**

Today I’m sharing a “hack your to-do list” kind of tip! This is a great productivity tip for moms, whether or not you stay at home with your children. This one has really helped me over the years, and luckily, it’s something you can implement right away, today!
The hack: Make sure your to-do list includes specific results!
If your to-do list includes actual results (specific outcomes), it’ll be life-changing for you. I used to be someone who’d write my to-do list in a very general way – without specific actions or specific outcomes that I wanted. This is such a better, more effective way to write a list! It’s a quick hack and a quick tweak for the way you’re already doing things.
A personal example: I have a blog (as you know, ha!) and I used to write things on my to-do list like “work on blog” or “write a blog post.” Now, that could work for some people, but I think generally speaking, when you write something too vague, you tend to wander or circle around the actual task, and you end up wasting time. And before you know it, naptime or worktime is over and you haven’t really accomplished that thing!
The reason why being vague is a problem? If I write “work on blog,” that just sends me off to my computer to sit there and maybe start scrolling, or doing random tasks like tweaking something on my blog that doesn’t need fixing that day. It’s very inefficient.
But if I write something ultra-specific, like “create a Pinterest graphic for Florida trip blog post,” then I know exactly what to do! I know I need to go to Canva.com, where I design graphics, and I can input the exact words about the blog post, and even start uploading it to Pinterest and pinning it!
There is a huge difference between what we can get done when we are just generally sitting in front of our computer (or standing in the kitchen) compared to when we tell ourselves to do something very specific!
The funny thing is, we often mentally know what we want our result to be! Maybe if I wrote “work on blog,” I knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to work on a Pinterest graphic for a particular blog post…or maybe if I wrote “meal prep,” and then I stood in the kitchen, I knew I wanted to make energy balls, but I never wrote that down, so then I’m not doing efficient and necessary actions like finding the recipe, pulling out bowls and measuring cups, and gathering ingredients!
So, there are things we can do to set ourselves up for success! And we want to be our own best cheerleader in terms of productivity – we don’t want to set ourselves up for feelings of failure!
You’ll find you are much more successful if you have actual results written on your to-do list because it takes some of the “wondering” out. It always takes energy to reevaluate your to-do list and hone in on what you actually meant! We don’t want to waste any time, and we don’t want to waste any energy or effort, especially if it’s our special allotted time of the day when we know we can get something done (for me, it’s often our 2-hour quiet time). That is when I know I can work on something important and specific, so I want the action plan to be very explicitly laid out for me!
I hope that quick tip was helpful for you! We all want to feel like we can set ourselves up for success instead of feelings of failure, and it feels so good to get something truly checked off of our to-do list instead of wasting energy on wondering what we meant.
Have you tried writing super specific outcomes on your to-do list? I’d love to hear how it works for you!
If you’re interested in hearing more tips and strategies, then be sure to watch my free webinar linked below – it’s all about productivity secrets for moms of young children.
You can also join the waitlist for The Present Mama Playbook, my online homemaking and motherhood course!