I think sometimes to get your “to-do” list up to date, you just need to put aside a day or segments in the day to do certain things like for example:

Mon: invoices, admin stuff
tue: sales etc
wed: blogs
thur: updates

and for the rest you do your work

Is anyone else bothered by the cheesy stock photos around here? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have a photo to accompany a blog post, but if it doesn’t really have anything to add to the post, why not just leave it off? The girl with boxing gloves doesn’t add much for me.

If you are wondering how to prioritize tasks in general, Steve Pavlina had a good article about that on his blog at:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/05/how-to-prioritize/

I’m not saying not to do the small tasks. But if they are not related to your high-powered tasks (or goals), then you should limit the time you spend on them. Your real focus should be the high-powered tasks — try to do them first and spend more of your time on them.

Batch process the smaller ones. Make all your phone calls and do all your emails at once, for example. Process your inbox to empty and do all your paperwork at once. Set certain times (or just one time of the day for all of them) and get through them quickly.

The problem is that these small tasks often end up taking up most of our time. They somehow take priority over the more important stuff, perhaps because we are avoiding thinking about the important stuff. My suggestion is to focus on the important stuff, get it done first, and then rush through the smaller tasks. If you get the important stuff done but only get 3/4ths of the small tasks done, you’ve been pretty productive.