If you have a long list of tasks, chances are that you have many that are low priority, labeled as “future”, or simply regarded as “whenever” items. Chances are also hight that these items will never get done, but will keep on mounting. Since many of us have a constant flow of urgent and short term tasks, we never really get around to non-urgent tasks because we always have stuff to do. If you also want to get some of the less important stuff done without sacrificing others, here are a few tips to get you going.

1 - Stop prioritizing and use a calendar

I have stopped detailed prioritizing a long time ago. This is of course only possible if you use a calendar based approach, but the best way I found to both simplify my task list and give me a chance to complete those nagging unimportants is to just stop assigning priorities and use a calendar.

This will mean that you will see the priority of the tasks if you open your calendar by just finding which day they’re at. You shouldn’t prioritize inside a day, if you can’t complete all items you shouldn’t put them there in the first place.

The use of this method is that you will no longer have a list with the labels “today”, “tomorrow”, “this week”, “this month” and so on. Since the workflow is constant it is better if you just distribute this throughout days, and if you finish stuff on Monday and still have time you don’t go on to Tuesday’s tasks as you normally would, you complete a low priority task instead.

2 - Assign specific times to work on low priority items

Simply put, take an hour or two each week or day (as your time allows) and stop thinking about the important stuff, focus on low priorities. These are likely to be fun things, or at least useful tasks, so it will enable you to get some rest from work anyway, an added bonus.

Using a calendar you can plan this effectively, but you can also randomly choose a time each day to fit your schedule. If you are super busy, you can go as simple as 10 minutes a day, the goal is not to complete all low priority items in one go, it1s to get to work on them.

3 - Tie important and non important items together

Another way to get yourself to work on the items of lower importance in your list is to tie them to high priority items. For example, you can decide that when you’ve completed web design project “A” for your client, you then have to complete the cataloging of your CD-s.

This works best if you have low importance tasks which are relatively short, at least compared to your other tasks, since you don’t want to spend 1 hour on each important task, and 4 on low priorities. You can tie more low priorities to one higher, or vice versa, whatever works best for your specific task list.

4 - Use your breaks to complete items

If you have some low priority stuff that’s fun, or you want to do, but never seem to get around to do it, use some of your breaks if you feel up to it. Doing ones which make you feel good will complement your break, not take it away, and you will have one less item to think about.

You can use 5 minute breaks, lunch breaks, or ten day vacations if you like, just remember to relax and take it easy. The goal is to have your break, but also do some items, so make sure you only do ones which don’t tire you out or stress you.

5 - Integrate items for productivity

This is a trickier step, but it can work if some of your high and low priorities are compatible. The best analogy I can think of is if you have “take out garbage” and “go to the store” on your list, why not take the garbage out on the way to the store?

Things will inevitability get more complicated than this, so don’t worry if you can’t integrate all your tasks, but crossing 2-3 items off only is still great!

Also, don’t be afraid to create more bloated tasks with this one. I have “organize Hack Your Day posts” on my list which is a high priority, but I also have “organize guest posts”, which is much lower. Doing both at once takes longer of course, but since the actions involved are similar, these will take less time overall if done together. Therefore instead of these I just put “organize all posts into a database”.

If you blog a lot, especially if you do it professionally, a lot of your day will be spent writing and reading stories. An RSS feed is an integral part of this, both for finding stuff to write about and also to keep yourself up to date on news. I think Google Reader is an excellent tool to manage 90% of your workflow in terms of writing and reading, it ads a great deal to my productivity at least.

I used to send myself the stories I wanted to read or work on through Google Reader (take a look at the post here), but since I’ve switched to a tag and folder based approach. Here’s how I manage my blog workflow in 5 steps to maximize my productivity.

1. Organize your feeds by importance

Instead of organizing my feeds by category it is more effective from an organization point of view to doing this by importance. This is helpful because I may have 1000+ unread items from some news feeds, which is not a big deal, but just one post missed from a site like the official Google blog will make me quite unhappy indeed. Therefore to stop interesting, albeit less important news items clogging me up, I create three folders, “Important”, “To Watch”, “Other”. My important folder contains product blogs, like the Remember the Milk blog, or the Official Gmail Blog so I can get the latest development news quickly. It also contains some top blogs like Lifehacker. The “To Watch” folder contains other blogs which also have cool stories, but if I miss out on one, or read it a day later the world doesn’t collapse. “Other” contains general news blogs I read or fun stuff, like the Beaver and Steve RSS feed.

2. Create categories for your workflow

One feature that Google Reader introduced not long ago helped a lot in my productivity and is party the reason for making the change from email to a wholly Reader based solution. Apart from folders, you can now tag posts, and even view them later on as part of that tag. I have three types of tags, I call them resource tags, info tags and archive tags.

Info tags are tags which I add to regularly, but I also remove items every day. They could be compared to to-do lists because all items represent something to do. A tag like this would be my “To Read” tag. All posts go in here which I will not write about, but I want to read because it contains some info, usually regarding my blog, or blogging. Once I have read the item I will delete it from this tag and either remove it completely from Google Reader, or move it to an archive tag.

Resource tags contain items which have resource lists in them. A post about the top 10 to do lists on the net would be put in here for example. I will not cover this post as is, but it provides a list of services which I might want to cover. Resource articles don’t stay around forever either. I usually review items in this tag once a week and if I find services I like I record which ones they are somewhere and I delete the item.

Archive tags just serve to contain material which I delete from other tags. Posts which provided me with valuable info might be put here just in case I need to reference them again, you never know. I rarely delete something from an archive tag, but it may be a good idea to go through it every 3-4 months and clear it up a bit.

In reality I actually use three tags “Resource List”, “To Read” and “Archive”, these correspond to my three categories, but the reason I always talked about categories is that you can have more than one info tag, depending on the field you work in and the type of blog you write.

3. Record your ideas

Recording your ideas is very important, especially for me because I just have so many. About 50% of these turn out to be not so great, but since I take them all down, I’m left with the other 50% that is good. I use drafts to record everything, and by draft a simple title will do to quickly jot down a thought. I use Windows Live Writer to manage all the ideas and posts because I can write as many drafts as I want, going through them one by one, and once done publish them from right there.

I transfer all story ideas that come from my RSS feed to Live Writer as well as stuff that just pops up during the day. About 90% of the time I just come up with a quick title and put the source of the story (if any) in the body, and perhaps a few notes and pointers so I don’t forget. This way Writer works sort of like an ideas repository for me.

4. Create daily routines

I say routines because I don’t like it if my whole day is governed by one task list our one routine. I have 4-5 things I do each day and the reason I separated them is that if I skip one the system doesn’t fall apart. One of my favorite routines is the RSS scanning every morning. Basically I get up at around 6am and go through all my RSS items.

On my first go I star all items of interest, regardless of what category they will fall into. I then fire up Live Writer and transfer all stories I will write by creating a new post, coming up with the title and opening the link to the site of the item, copying the link into the body of the draft. I take down any additional notes I have, but I do not spend more than 30 seconds on one single post. I un-star all items that I have transferred, so I am left with only 3-4 starred ones which I will now review again.

On the second pass I decide what to do with the remaining items. I either send them to an info tag, for reading later, or send them to the resource list for future reference. More often than not, I also immediately delete some items because I realize I will not really need them anymore, you’d be surprised at the difference 5 minutes of settling in makes to your views on one piece of info.

While making two passes is a bit redundant, I find that it increases my productivity overall. I may read an item twice, but the organization and clarity of mind I gain makes the extra spent time quite worth it.

5. Set up fix review times

As I have already mentioned, it is important to set up some review times, just like you would in GTD. I review info tags daily (and weekly) and my resource tags weekly. I review info tags daily from the perspective of reading some, and every Friday I review them to purge the list, delete items I won’t really read. My resource tags get reviewed weekly for the same reason. I either take down some items from a resource list or I just delete it.

You also need to review your drafts often, since you may find that a story has been sitting on your “desk” unwritten for ages. I review my draft list just like my info tags, once a day to get a glimpse of what I need to write or what I missed out on, and weekly to purge the list and delete drafts that don’t seem like great ideas anymore.

About once a month I review my whole system as is. I take a look at the tags I’m using, my feed reading activity and so on. I remove feeds I don’t really read, or that I don’t find too interesting, I add tags and delete them if necessary (I advise as little change here as possible) and make tweaks and changes where needed.

The idea is to keep your system as static as possible, while making it flexible enough to make changes if needed. Ideally you should find things to tweak all the time, find new tools and so on, but your core system should stay in tact.