For some food truck owners, to-do lists are life savers; they keep them organized and on task. For others, they’re useless pieces of paper to ignore as they grow longer and longer. The next time you sit down to write a to-do list for your food truck (or decide to work on an existing one), follow these tips.

How To Make Your Food Truck To-Do Lists Work For You

  • Break it down. To-do lists are not the same as goals or projects. Only include specific tasks that move a project toward completion. If a to-do list item is too large to get done in one step, break it down further.
  • Make multiple lists. Create a few lists of stuff that needs to get done. One should be a master list, with every item you’d like to accomplish in the long-term. Another can be a weekly project list, with everything that needs to take place in the next seven days. The third should be high-impact tasks list, with the tasks that need to get done todayEvery day, see which items from the master list and weekly project list should move to the daily list.
  • Include specifics. Help your future self out by including details that will make doing the task easier. Instead of “Get in touch with fishmonger,” try “Call Sam the Fishmonger about new supplier agreement at 555-5555.”
  • Time it. Now that you’ve created your food truck to-do lists, go back and put a time estimate next to every item. It might even help to turn the to-do lists into a kind of schedule with specific times and places.
  • Schedule scheduling. One of the trickiest aspects of to-do lists is actually sitting down to make them. Pick a time every day, whether it’s the morning before everyone else wakes up, or the hour right before going to bed, when you can organize all your tasks and determine what still needs to be accomplished.

RELATED: What Do You Do With Your Food Truck’s To-Do List Leftovers?

The Bottom Line

Between work and other real-life obligations, achieving our goals and making deadlines is almost always harder than it seems. Creating efficient to-do lists is a feat in itself. Use these tips to help you organize your life into a manageable list. Then all you do is, cross off each entry one at a time.

How do you handle your food truck to-do lists? Do you have any additional tips? Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section or social media. Facebook | Twitter