Today I’ve found a quite interesting blog on personal development by Gleb Reys and an interesting article about managing to-do lists. The author describes his approach of managing to-do lists. I use them in my daily life so the topic is very interesting for me. I liked the idea of using stickers, but I think it should be changed. I’ve described my idea in comment to his post and decided to post it here as is.
Thank you for the article.
Like you I always use to-do lists to organize my routine and I’ve experimented with it quite a lot. I think your idea of a blackboard (A4 paper in your case) with areas for each kind of tasks - it’s a good idea. But for me I’m using slightly different approach - instead of dividing areas by time I’m dividing them by priority: must do (the most urgent), should do, nice do, can delegate, can eliminate (the less urgent). When I get the new task to do I think whether it’s possible to accomplish it immediately or not. If I can - I do it, if not - I decide where it’s better to place this new task, in which category. Each day I try to complete all my tasks from the first category and in the end of the day I look through all these groups and rearrange all the tasks. Very often I find some task not important or not actual (usually it happens with tasks from last category) and remove them from my list. Currently I’m using a mind-mapping tool for keeping this tree of tasks, but recently I’ve started to think that it would be better to bring it offline. So I’m going to try out a blackboard and stickers approach.
Another group of tasks I have had (now I’m using another approach) - weekly tasks. Again it’s a subtree where I have days as branches of a current week root and when I’m planning my week and days I place tasks as a leaf of correspondent branch.
Now I’m not using this approach because of extra paper work and I just have a general tree of tasks grouped by priority and a small sheet of paper where I have a short list of tasks for current day. I don’t track the history of tasks because I don’t know why should I need it - I made the task, I got result, that’s all.
Thank you.
Here the screenshot of my To-Do list:
The idea of grouping tasks by priority belongs to Brian Tracy and was described in his book “Eat that frog”.
