Republic of Geektronica via Mark the writer
I have recently reconsidered my steadfast commitment to web-based task management tools and tried using Microsoft Outlook’s much-ignored Tasks feature.
I decided to try Outlook for task management for two reasons: First, I was giving a presentation to users of Outlook and wanted to have some tips that didn’t make them seize up with fear when I mentioned a Web2.0 tool like Remember the Milk.
To-do lists are great when they have five things on them - you can easily see which are left, and it’s satisfying to whittle down the list as you check things off.
The real problem comes when your to-do list is 70 items long, not to mention the 25 emails, each containing some type of task, that you’ve marked as unread. Simply looking at a list this long and trying to pick something to actually do is a painful experience.
The solution is to remove from your view everything you can’t or aren’t ready to work on. In order to make this possible, you need to decide when you can, should, and must work on each item. To borrow a phrase from David Allen, you need to decide “when it shows up, not when it blows up.”
One practical way to do this is to set a due date for each item. The due date, according to Linenberger, should not be the final deadline for the task or project, but the date when you start working on it - the date your system should bring it to your attention.
If you have a lot of stuff in your inbox that you’ve been putting off for a while, it’s tempting to set every item’s due date to “today.” This really doesn’t help, because it bypasses the need to triage your tasks and decide what really needs to get done today, and separate it from what can wait until Monday.
You can also set a higher priority for the items you absolutely must get done that day. This is a way of telling yourself, through your task management system, that you should postpone the other items and do this one if you run out of time and can’t do everything on your list for today.
No comments yet.