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Yesterday I wanted to draw a new mind map but unfortunately had not any idea what to make it about. Finally I’d chosen the topic - “why it’s better for me to have lunch at home”. Here the result:

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”.

This morning I’ve spent drawing. I was creating the mind-map for Steve Pavlina podcast about solving problems I listned recently. Before I created my maps using a FreeMind program but then I decided to do it manually. The main reason is that when you are drawing it you are thinking about the subject of the mind-map and understanding it more deeply. Morover it brings me more joy to spend a certain amount of time creating something and eventually see the results, especially if I like what I get. Creating this map took me about an hour. Of course it’s not ideal and even now I can see a great deal of things to rething and to improve. First of all it’s that my map is not clearly centered, then I think it’s better to make all the arrows more thinny. But it’s almost my first map and I’ll take into account all ideas and mistakes when I’ll create my following maps.