Emilio: I want to talk with you about (1) moderation of your forum posts, (2) scheduling versus planning, (3) more than a to do list, (4) alternatives to context-per-day
*Moderation of forum posts* Forum posts by new users are held for review, in order to weed out spam. After you post a few times successfully, you will usually find that moderation has been turned off. *Scheduling versus Planning*At least three of us have encouraged you to avoid falling into the trap of scheduling your tasks. You continue to resist this advice, so we should consider the possibility that maybe scheduling is your most effective way of managing tasks. It might be true. In my experience maybe 10% to 20% of people actually do better with scheduling than without. Usually these are people who have to face a client who proposes some major undertaking and then demands an estimated completion date, or who need to tell a client or manager exactly how many more deliverables they can add to their already over-committed lives. You have not mentioned any external pressures like this, but still, you could be the exception. But seriously, have you looked at the Getting Things Done methodology or any of the other popular planning methodologies? Even if you think that you are the exceptional person who works best with schedules, you really cannot know that for sure if you have not even considered a different way of doing it. Let me suggest once more that you read a copy of the book "Getting Things Done, the art of stress-free productivity" by David Allen. He does a good job of showing an excellent way of accomplishing what you need to get done, I'm not going to bother trying to summarize it for you. If you don't have time to look at the book, at least invest 13 minutes in this video: https://youtu.be/kOSFxKaqOm4 *More than a to do list*You said "I need more than a to do list." I agree. You also need more than a schedule, you need a plan. A plan is more than a schedule. Read the book. *Alternatives to context-per-day*OK, let's assume that you should be assigning dates to tasks and see whether you are doing it the best that you can. First, if you are going to have a context per day you could consider setting open and closed hours per context. For example, you could have a context #Monday that is open every week from midnight to midnight, and closed the rest of the week. Or, you could open up your Monday tasks for preparation Sunday nioght and leave them open for followup Tuesday morning, by setting #Monday's open hours from 5PM Sunday through 10am Tuesday. If I wanted to manage my tasks this way, I would be skeptical about my ability to accurately predict Friday's must-do tasks on the prior Sunday night. I would probably assign some tasks to be done today (Monday) and some to be done tomorrow (Tuesday) and some to be done before the end of the week. I would use the star to mark tasks to be done today, the blue flag for tasks to be done tomorrow, and set "the task is a goal for [week]" for the rest of the week's tasks. I would then use contexts for other important purposes like activity type (>Calls, >Online) or location (@HardwareStore, @Library) or contact/client, etc. I would then use the Active Starred by Context view to show me the tasks I should be working on today, grouped by context to make it easier to pick the next one. Monday night, I would look a the starred tasks that did not get completed and determine what went wrong and what I should try to do about it; I would review the blue flag list to see if I still think that all of these tasks should get done Tuesday (especially in view of whatever Monday tasks are sliding to Tuesday) and I would then put stars onto all of the blue flag tasks (except for any that I have decided I cannot get to on Tuesday. I would finish my Monday night review by looking through the Goal:Week list and adding blue flags to anything I think I should attempt on Wednesday. -Dwight On Monday, August 22, 2016 at 5:19:33 AM UTC-4, Emilio Jimenez wrote: > > > Hi Dwight > > Don't really know why my posts don't appear right away, but I hope you get > to see this one. > > A lot of people tell me that scheduling is a trap, but I really can't > understand why. Maybe I don't explain myself correctly, I don't mean day > and time 3 months from now. > > I just mean Sunday night / Monday Morn, see my different projects both > business and personal and assign a day of the week for them. And each day > try to get the musts done, then high priority. To me an important part of > task management is scheduling, I know we all work differently, I just don't > do well with a bunch of tasks on my list of all areas and just get done > what I feel like, the way I do it allows me to get a bit of all areas and > projects into my week and make progress, since I focus on the 80/20 of the > day, progress is there even if I don't finish all. > > I might be using contexts and a view context view. What do you think? > > thanks! > > -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/6e284f4b-7229-4b23-b401-5821e2aadceb%40googlegroups.com. 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