Use the ‘7-Minute Life’ to Create Faster To-Do Lists

There are so many productivity techniques out there and a lot of them can feel pretty intense. They might involve turning your to-dos into data, creating elaborate matrixes to prioritize your tasks, or listing everything you have to do before assigning it a grade based on a subjective scale. All of that takes time. The "7 Minute Life" framework, on the other hand, only takes a few minutes per day and is an effective way to plan what you need to do and stay motivated. Here's how it works.

What is the 7 Minute Life?

This concept comes from Allyson Lewis, a productivity guru who founded the 7 Minute Life in an effort to help people feel engaged with their work and interests. Her technique can be applied to a variety of things, like unfinished tasks or reaching certain goals, but it's also broad enough for everyday use.

Essentially, you dedicate seven minutes each morning and night to making decisions about your day and reflecting on what you did and need to do tomorrow. The idea is that you should choose to consciously focus for just those two seven-minute intervals, using that time to make deliberate choices about how you'll spend the rest of the time in your day. Lewis' technique is based on the fact that each day only has 1,440 minutes and 14 minutes only make up 1% of those. The rest of your time, if you plan it right, is all yours, so you should use that 1% of planning and reflecting time to prioritize your tasks and reflect on how it all went.

How to use the 7 Minute Life technique

Lewis offers courses, coaching, and resources for turning the 7 Minute Life into a whole lifestyle, but you can start small. Every morning, start your day by setting a timer for seven minutes and thinking about what you need to get done. You can create a to-do list during this time, structuring your day based on the magnitude and resource demands of individual tasks. At night, set your timer again, spending those seven minutes reflecting on what went well and what didn't, as well as what you learned and can implement the next day, as if you were doing an after-action review.

You don't want to spend longer than seven minutes on either activity. The goal here isn't to overthink or plan too much; it's to train yourself to make choices and assessments quickly, get on with the action, and learn from the patterns you start to notice during the reflection.

You can do this in a planner or phone app, but Lewis also sells a 7 Minute Life Daily Planner, if you'd prefer a journal more specifically designed for this purpose.

While you can certainly use other to-do list making and prioritizing techniques during the seven minutes in the morning, remember that this is about untethering yourself from getting into your own head too much and learning to be quicker with your decision-making and action plans. Once you identify your goals and mission, you should spend much more time doing than you do thinking or planning, which is what sets this technique apart from some of the other weedier ones out there.