Noting What You've Done Is More Productive Than Listing What is To Do

I've been experimenting for a while with ways to increase my personal productivity.  My business is at the stage now where I have more enquiries than I can cope with, but not enough cash to invest in much extra help.  To make matters worse I haven't optimised for multiple operators on a lot of what I do, so I can't yet easily delegate quite a lot of the stuff. 

So to go forward I need to make sure I get the absolute maximum of paying work completed and shipped.  I also have huge numbers of items on my To Do list.  Or rather lists - I am using Trello so I don't just have a list.  I have lists of lists.

It seems that the best way to be productive is to treat each day as separate challenge and to make sure that I fill it with as much achievement as is humanly possible.  Keeping a note of what I have done seems, on the face of it, perverse.  If you are short of time why worry about the past?  Get on and get more things done!

But it turns out that there are two very good reasons for keeping notes on what you have done on a particular day.  The minor one is that when you are busy your short term memory rapidly becomes frazzled and it is surprising how often it helps to check whether you have actually done something.   But the more important one is that as your list of what you have done during the day grows you not only feel a sense of achievement, you are actually motivated to get more stuff done.

It sounds weird, but as long as you have energy left it is very motivating to have in mind what you have already done.  By contrast, the huge pile of stuff you have yet to do is simply intimidating.