Dump Your Laundry List: Google Sheets Task Management Template

You’re staring at your overflowing inbox and the scattered sticky notes covering your desk. As you scramble to respond to yet another "urgent" email, you realize you have once again postponed work on a crucial strategic initiative – a project that could significantly impact your community for years to come. The consequences of this chaotic approach are becoming increasingly apparent to you. You’re finding yourself constantly putting out fires instead of driving meaningful change. The stress of juggling multiple priorities without a clear system is not only affecting your work performance but also spilling over into your personal life. Your laundry list has become the bane of your existence.

You're not alone in this struggle. Many leaders fall victim to their own success. The more you respond or produce, the more work you receive. One common solution is to simply jot down your tasks in an unsorted "Laundry List” or use your email inbox as a de facto to-do list. However, these approaches come with significant pitfalls: (1) Reactive Rather Than Strategic When your task list is dictated by others (via email or by the newest fire), important strategic work consistently takes a back seat. Over time, this trains you to seek quick dopamine hits from small task completion, making it challenging to do deep and strategic work. (2) Psychological Burden Adding items to an ever-growing list creates adds large mental weight to your work. As tasks accumulate, the prospect of tackling them becomes daunting, leading to avoidance and procrastination. (3) Guilt from Lack of Follow-through Even if you tag items by priority (eg: “do later”), many non-urgent but important tasks are consigned to an indefinite void. This not only adds to the mental weight of task debt but also induces guilt for not following through. Many days, you feel disappointed because of the gap between what you hoped to do and what you actually did.

It's time to transform your approach to task management with our Google Sheets Task Management Template. This practical solution addresses these common pitfalls, providing a framework that: (1) Stays focused on strategic work by connecting tasks to goals (2) Enables follow through by assessing feasibility and when you’ll do them (3) Keeps your tasks lightweight and flexible through regular adaptation Let's explore three powerful features of this template that can help you reclaim your time and maximize your impact.

Many social impact leaders struggle to maintain focus on long-term strategic objectives while managing daily tasks and urgent requests. Our template offers a clear connection between those two elements. How? Every task on your list is purposefully aligned with your broader objectives, helping you maintain focus on what truly matters. Key Steps 1. Identify Strategic Goals Clearly define what success looks like to you this quarter. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant to your mission, and time bound. Then identify the top strategic initiatives (your big bets) that you hypothesize will help you achieve your goals.

The first step is to go to the “tags” tab and add the relevant strategic initiatives in this column.

They will now appear as dropdowns in the Plan tab

Tip You may struggle to define the best goals and identify the best strategic initiatives to achieve them. While this is separate from task management, it's crucial for maximizing your impact with limited resources. The following resources can help you clarify your objectives:

2. Chunk Strategic Initiatives into Specific Tasks For each strategic initiative you’ve prioritized, identify key tasks that will contribute significantly to achieving that goal. If you’ve never done this, it can be hard, so try ChatGPT (or another conversational AI tool) to generate a list or ask a friendly expert for an example plan. Example Here, we’ve chunked the “Onboard” initiatives into three tasks, and “Success” into five.

3. Assign Priority Scores Score the importance of each task from 1-5 and sequence them. This helps you separate truly important tasks from less critical ones and determines the order in which they should be tackled. Example With 5 = most priority, and 1 = earlier, you can see the First Task under Onboard is the most crucial in that list.

Even if you do set goals and create tasks, it’s still very common for busy leaders to not follow through. While lacking capacity is absolutely a major reason, other root causes I’ve seen include: (a) Forgetting about goals Many times, leaders create goals and key tasks — and they collect dust. In the rush of the urgent, you even can’t remember where you put them. (b) Underestimating available time You loosely schedule important tasks without taking into account the possibility of new fires, like a team member out on PTO the week you wanted to start an important task.

To solve this problem, you must assess feasibility: 1. Do you actually have enough time? 2. If not: what can you do to make time? 3. if yes: when are you going to complete these tasks? Key Steps 1. Do you actually have enough time? (a) Estimate how long the strategic initiative will take. Create conservative estimates with buffers, especially if it’s your first time. This approach will save you time and headaches later by reducing the need for cascading adjustments if you encounter delays. If you’re really struggling to make an estimate, try asking ChatGPT or a friendly expert, but don’t worry too much about getting it exactly right. Add these estimates to the template and calculate totals. Example In the column “Est Hrs” you add in numbers to the tasks.

In the pivot table tab, you can see how much total time it’ll take. In this example, it’ll take about total 79 hours this quarter.

(b) See how much time you actually have. Review your calendar to estimate open blocks of time, subtracting a 30%. Additionally, consider factors like team capacity, personal commitments, and major organizational events: • Team availability. An important team member will be out on PTO. Or you recognize that sick days spike during certain months. • Personal availability. Your spouse will travel for work, putting morning childcare responsibilities on your plate that week. • Key org-wide events. Examples include the date of an important product launch, conference, holiday promotion, team or board retreat, or tax deadline. Example Let’s say you scroll through your calendar for the upcoming quarter and see about 5 hours of open time a week. That’s about 60 hours of available time (5 hours a week x 12 weeks) After you subtract the 30% buffer, you’re left with 40 hours of availability. (c) Calculate the difference. In our case, you’re lacking 40 hours (80 estimated hours to complete - 40 hours of availability). So that means you clearly don’t have enough time, taking us to question 2 below. 2. If you don’t have time: what can you do to make time? The core question here is: what can you do to generate about 40 more hours this quarter? On average, that’s about 3 hours a week. (This is the most common scenario to be in by the way. Humans tend to be overoptimistic about the time they have, and this is a major reason why most strategic initiatives end up delayed or failing.)

In summary: (a) Identify your lowest-value and most energy-draining tasks; (b) For the worst-performing tasks, eliminate, delegate, and/or simplify them. The resources below provides a more comprehensive approach to this:

Example In our example, lets say you used a few strategies to get to 40 extra hours in the quarter • Eliminate You reduced the frequency of several meetings and deprioritized a different initiative altogether. You also eliminated less important tasks in your strategic initiative. Altogether, this saved 15 hours that quarter. • Delegate You delegated some tasks in your strategic initiative to a team member with more time and experience with the task. You also delegated some existing tasks on your plate to a virtual assistant. For both, you marked them with the “follow up” status tag. This saved another 20 hours.

• Simplify You realized a few of your tasks for this and some other initiatives were too complex and could be simplified with a more minimal solution. This saved you the last 5 hours, bringing your total savings to 40 hours. Reassess capacity gaps Flipping back to the pivot table tab in the template, you’re now closer to 43 hours, versus the original 79 hours, saving yourself a nice 36 hours or about 3 hours a week.

3. If you do have time: when are you going to do these tasks? Open up your calendar again and which weeks you might do these tasks, taking into account sequence and duration. Jot those weeks down into the Start Week column.

You can also go to the pivot table tab, to see the following visual. It’s showing that you’re putting a lot of work 4/1, and with some major commitments that week, it seems infeasible.

So you adjust. You move some tasks to the following week and the week after, resulting in this more even spread.

Flipping to the timeline tab, you can also get this visual to give yourself a gut check.

Caution Based on my experience, I don’t recommend blocking off time in your calendar right now. This will only add an annoying task of constantly rescheduling multiple events. Instead, I suggest trying the strategies in the next section.

If you’ve made it this far, congrats! You’re in the top 10% of social impact leaders. Sadly, life's realities can still interfere with follow-through. Why? Because things change. To address this, our template builds in flexibility by design, allowing you to adapt to changing priorities and unexpected events. Key Steps 1. Regularly review and identify your top items for the week This review can happen weekly (eg: a Sunday night) or even daily (eg: every afternoon or evening before the next day) Spend a few minutes identifying your top priorities for the upcoming week or the next day. Here’s how the template can help you.

Flip to the week view The first thing in your review is to look at your “week” view in the template. Click on the calculator to see different views.

Good news: You should already have items populated here, giving you a clear answer for your top priority that week. This also ensures your main goal stays top of mind. That’s the beauty of entering those dates in the previous section. Example Let’s say the upcoming week is 3/4. In the 3/4 group, you already have two critical tasks suggested for your Onboard and Success initiatives.

Now, make adjustments! Going back to example, you realize 11 hours this week (the two tasks for 3/4 add up to 11 hours) makes you groan; it’s impossible with childcare center closing this week. To solve the problem, you split the task into two smaller parts: One 5 hour task for the week of 3/4, and another 5 hour task in the week of 3/11.

Remember: any of the strategies mentioned above—such as eliminating, delegating, or simplifying—can also help here. Flip to the Initiative View Toggle the "strategic initiative" view to track progress, identify gaps, and make updates as needed. Again, adjust! Example For instance, update the status tags for completed tasks and add critical details to any tasks you initially overlooked.

Pivot Table View These views help you track overall progress and predict potential issues, allowing you to adjust when total task estimates significantly exceed the available time. Track progress

2. Block time in your calendar Now add in the most relevant tasks to your calendar, based on their expected duration. Also add "buffer time" between tasks so that any delays don’t create cascading effects across your calendar.

Blocking time offers several significant advantages: • Clarity: You eliminate ambiguity and the temptation to do something else. • Protection: It signals to others that you are busy during that time. • Feasibility Check: You assess how realistic it is to complete these tasks given your commitments. If necessary, you can adjust and rearrange your schedule. 3. Reflect on your progress and changes • Accuracy. This is extra credit, but this small practice can help you build predictability in future planning. Jot down how much time tasks actually took you and how much you were actually able to get done in a week. Example Go to the column “Actual Hrs”

Flip to the pivot table tab. • The first pivot table below helps track your "velocity"—the amount of work you actually complete each week. In this example, your velocity is approximately 6 hours per week. Assuming your commitments and workload remain similar in the following quarter, you might budget 6 hours weekly.

• The second table is less critical; it simply calculates how accurate your estimates were. On average, you were only about 1.5 hours off each week—pretty close!

• Continuous improvement Identify common challenges and pain points hindering your progress. Dedicate regular time to enhance your system and become even more productive. • Celebrate In the hustle of everyday life, it’s easy to overlook your progress. Instead, use gratitude and positive reinforcement to continue encouraging deep, strategic work. Reflecting on your achievements is gratifying and reinforces the idea that you can tackle difficult tasks and make substantial progress.

As we've explored throughout this article, transforming your chaotic laundry list into a strategic task management system is not just about getting more done. Instead, it’s about working smarter and being more pragmatic. Say goodbye to overwhelming task lists and hello to a more organized, focused, and impactful approach to your social impact work.

👉 Request it by filling out the form here. I’ll then send you the template for download, so you can build a more productive and strategic future. For other articles in this series, check out the below