Re: [MLO] An Eureka moment and idea - The True MLO Tool!

[Dwight Arthur]

Hi, Patricio I believe that you are describing project management tools. Project management tools and task management tools have many similarities. Project management tools are more powerful and take more time to set up and maintain. If you can afford to hire someone to track your time, update every task every day to reflect additional time spent, revise estimated resources per task as needed, and research and code all the inter-task dependencies then you may be ready for a project management tool. Maybe you can do all of that yourself in which case I salute you. I tried it before I found MLO and I found that I was spending more time on managing my projects than I was spending on getting them done. One of the things that a good project management tool will do for you is to identify the critical path, which is to say, out of all of the tasks available for you to work on right now, which is the one that is most holding up other tasks? The idea is that by throwing resources at the tasks on the critical path you can complete your project sooner. Here is a helpful guide to some current project management tools: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-project-management-software I have not tried any of these tools, my experience was with a prior generation. Maybe today's tools are enough better that what you want to do is feasible with them. But for me, a task management tool is what I need. More powerful is not always better. Managing tasks with a project manager sometimes felt to me like trying to spread jam on my toast using a chain saw. -Dwight On 2/10/2024 2:32 PM, Patricio Carranza wrote: Hi MLO Community! I hope this message finds you well. Today, I'd like to share an insight that recently crystallized for me, something that has been on my mind and challenging me for quite some time. I believe I've finally managed to articulate a fundamental aspect of personal task management that we could all benefit from discussing. At its core, managing personal tasks is fundamentally about managing our most precious resources: time (and energy, health and money too...). However, for the purposes of this discussion, let's focus on time management. Many of us use tools like MyLifeOrganized (MLO) to manage our tasks. MLO, for example, offers an impressive array of features that enable the creation and management of a sophisticated system for tracking tasks, to-do items, and even entire projects. It allows for the specification of task duration, priority, urgency, and supports an almost limitless hierarchy of task categorization. Despite these capabilities, a crucial question arises: what real value do these features offer if they don't simplify critical aspects of time management? Specifically: Time Allocation Across Life's Roles and Areas: How can we easily visualize and adjust our time distribution across different areas of our lives, roles, projects, or goals to ensure it aligns with our current ambitions and priorities? Planning Our Time Effectively: How can we plan our days, weeks, and months in a way that is realistic and flexible, ensuring that we don't overload ourselves with more tasks than we can handle in the available time? Adherence to Planned Time: What mechanisms do we have to track our actual time spent on tasks compared to our plans, enabling a thorough plan vs. action analysis? While there are workarounds and methods to achieve some of these objectives within existing applications, they often feel like makeshift solutions rather than integrated, purpose-built features. I believe there's an opportunity for us to discuss and perhaps envision enhancements or new tools that more directly address these fundamental aspects of personal task management. How can we better integrate time management into our task management applications to truly support our goals and improve our productivity and satisfaction? I'm eager to hear your thoughts and any experiences you might share on this topic. Together, we can explore ways to make our task management tools work even harder for us. Patricio. -- 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 mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/7a71f960-fe07-4347-847c-0f87070b23a1n%40googlegroups.com. -- 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 mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/257fd885-e11c-4dfa-8548-e815e44d84c5%40gmail.com.