Hi, Veran. MLO is a tool that could support many different methodologies for managing your tasks. MLO by itself does not impose a particular methodology. You have to find or invent a methodology that works for you, and then MLO will help you keep track.
Most methodologies devote a major effort to identifying which tasks I should do today. But they are using your rules and your values and priorities to work it out. I understand the feeling of looking at a heap of tasks and not knowing where to start - but you have to be able to put all your tasks down on paper and find today's tasks. If you can't figure it out. MLO will not be able to. The kind of default methodology that everyone understands is to start by trying to schedule the work. For the tasks that you think you might need to take care of soon, add the date you plan to start under Start Date and the date you plan to finish in Due Date. Then you can open a To-Do view and open the Start Date filter in the filter panel (on the left side of the screen) and put "today" in the "From" and "to" fields, you will get a list of tasks you should start today. Or you can get more fancy and use the advanced filter to select active tasks with a start date on or before today and get a list of everything you should be working on today. Scheduling methodology is easy to understand but it doesn't work very well. Everyone overestimates how much they will get done each day, and you end up with a clump of unfinished tasks that have to be rescheduled. As time goes on the clump gets bigger and takes longer to reschedule, until you are spending all your time managing your schedule with no time left to actually do any of your tasks. Here are two other methodologies that might help you. I'm recommending these two because they make sense to me, but they may not be the right ones for you. The Pomodoro technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique) provides an effective way of managing the tendency to overcommit yourself and helps to reduce the impact of interruptions, by breaking your work into indivisible chunks of 25 minutes each. You are still responsible for coming up with a list of today's tasks, though. Getting Things Done (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done) focuses on getting everything you need to do collected into one place where it can be organized and prioritized. If you adopt the GTD methodology you will find lots of tasks in your MLO profile, but they will be organized. Some tasks will be organized into projects. Some projects require the tasks to be completed in order, so only the first task uncompleted task is "active". Other projects are more complex, with explicit dependencies set up. Each task has a context, which tells you where you have to be or what tools you have to have to do the task. Some tasks have dates, but the dates don't tell when you plan to do the task, they tell when it's possible to do the task (so for example if you need to buy tickets to a performance, once the performance is over it's no longer meaningful to buy the tickets, so the last sale date for the tickets becomes the due date. Once you have all of this set up you can look at the report "active by context" - it shows tasks that are ready to be done (not waiting for a start date to arrive or for a dependency on another task) and you can focus in on the contexts that match where you are and what tools you have with you. If the list is still too long, you can add importance and urgency values and use them to sort your tasks. I hope that this gives you an idea of what to look forward to. IF the Getting Things Done methodology appeals to you, you should get the book (it's in many libraries) and read it. If you have a way of deciding what to do next, you can use that as a basis for how you set up MLO. Good luck and I'm sure you will be back with more questions and issues. -Dwight On Friday, October 4, 2013 10:51:58 AM UTC-4, [email protected] wrote: > > Hello, > > I don't know if I'm using MLO the right way, I'd like your point of vue. > > I'm working for several clients, so I created a folder by client. Inside, > I added the projects and tasks for each client. > I also created a folder for my personal life, with my own projects and > tasks. > > My problem is that when I open MLO, I have so many tasks infront of me > that I don't know where to start. > > I'd like to create a view with all the things that I have to do each day, > but I don't know how to do that. > > Am I using MLO OK ? Is there a way to create a kind of "to-do today list" ? > > Thanks > > Veran > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/3839f7bb-9d39-4bc3-93fe-90cb0596c268%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
