The Daily Big 3: pick three tasks each morning

The Daily Big 3 is a planning habit. Each morning, before email, you pick the three tasks that would make today a win, and you do those first. Everything else on your list can wait. Michael Hyatt made the Daily Big 3 a central part of his Full Focus Planner, and you can do it with any list.

Where does the Daily Big 3 come from?

Hyatt defines the Daily Big 3 as “the top three outcomes you need to accomplish for the day to make progress on your weekly and long-term goals and projects” in his article on the practice. He suggests writing them on a sticky note or on the Day Pages of his paper planner. So each of the three should move a bigger goal forward.

For me the problem was TickTick. Over two years, my TickTick Today list grew to about 300 tasks. Anything I gave a date and didn’t finish stayed there as overdue, so the list kept growing. A list that long can’t tell you where to start. The tasks that mattered were in there somewhere, mixed in with everything else.

The Big 3 sits on top of a list like that. You keep every task, and each morning you choose three of them for today.

Why three tasks?

One task is too few for most days. If it stalls, you have nothing else planned. Five or more turns back into a list, and you spend the day re-sorting it. Three is small enough to remember without opening the app. A workday also has meetings and messages that never make any list, and three larger tasks are about what fits around them.

Memory research gives an upper limit for what you can hold at once. In a 2001 review, Nelson Cowan put the capacity of short-term memory at about four chunks, within a range of three to five, when people can’t rehearse items or group them together. Three tasks fit inside that. The number comes from lab tasks, so I read it as a rough guide for planning a workday.

Put the three in order. Line one is the task that would make the day worth it if nothing else got done. When a meeting runs long or something breaks, line one is the task you protect.

How do I pick my three?

The routine takes a couple of minutes. Do it in this order.

1. Pick before you open email or Slack. Once other people’s requests are on screen, they start to look like the plan.
2. Look at today’s calendar. On a day with four hours of meetings, choose smaller tasks or start with two.
3. Ask yourself what would make today a win, and write down three answers.
4. Put them in order, with the most important one on line one.
5. For line one, decide when you will start, in the form “when X happens, I do Y”. For example, “When standup ends, I open the landing page draft.”

Write each task as something you can finish and tick today. “Budget” is a topic, and you can’t tick it. “Send the Q3 budget draft” is done the moment you send it.

The three don’t all have to be work. If a health goal matters to you this quarter, a long run can take line three.

Step 5 comes from research on if-then plans. In a 2006 meta-analysis, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 independent tests of these plans and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65). Writing one plan, for line one only, keeps the routine short.

What happens to the rest of my list?

It stays where it is. You can still do those tasks today, after your three or between meetings. If you finish your three by early afternoon, pick the next task and keep going. Many days you won’t finish all three, and line one is the one to check.

When something urgent lands mid-morning, hold it up against line three first. If it matters more, it takes that line, and line three moves to tomorrow.

Two things make the rest of the list hard to ignore. Old tasks pile up, and new requests arrive all day. I wrote about the first in What to do with a never-ending to-do list and about the second in How to stop overcommitting your day.

Once a week, count how many Big 3 tasks you finished. If you finish all three most days, pick bigger tasks. If line one keeps slipping, make it smaller or start it earlier.

How Compass does this

Each morning, Today in Compass opens on the question “What would make today a win?” and three empty lines. Below them is a short list of what’s due, dated or left over in Things, TickTick, Todoist and Linear. Drag, star or type three tasks onto the lines. A finished Big 3 task frees its line for the next one. If you turn on Finn, the optional assistant, it suggests three tasks with a reason for each.