February 10th, 2010 Jeff
Most of us are experts at getting our to-dos out of our minds and into whatever task management system we use. Everything from GTD to plain old sticky notes gives you a sense of empowerment once your world is on some sort of manageable system.
But what happens as the to-dos don’t move from to-do to to-done? Your list becomes crowded, unmanageable and before long you’ve abandoned your system and life has descended back into chaos. This is where the power of the due date comes in.
Now lets review what a due-date is. Most people think it’s self-explanatory;
A date when something must be complete by.
But not all tasks have external forces pushing you towards a completion date. If you need to clean the fridge, the world will not explode if it’s not done by Friday. So items like this get pushed farther and farther down the list of priorities. But what if we play a mental game with ourselves and change the word must to should. So now the definition reads.
A date when something should be complete by
Now we can play all types of mental games. A week is more than a reasonable amount of time to get off your duff and clean the fridge. Do you have plans this week? Fine, make it for the week after next, but just make sure you assign a reasonable date to it. Lets put extra emphasis on reasonable, because a date that can’t be hit becomes even more of a distraction.
We’ve got a due date on our tasks, now what? Psychology does the rest. If you’re the type of person that keeps to-dos, then chances are you’re also the type of person that derives satisfaction from checking things off the list and experiences sadness or remorse when they stay on the list. The key is to make sure that your to-do system has someway to alert you when you have a task with a due date approaching or when a task is overdue. This signal is almost like the two-minute warning in football. It signals the brain that you’re behind and you’ve got shit to do! It motivates you in a way that can’t be explained without a PH.D.
We are a weird people psychologically, but we can use this insanity to our advantage. After reading this, go through your to-dos and start assigning realistic due dates to everything you want to move off the list.
There’s a special high that comes with checking off an item off your list. Use this post to stay high all day and all night.
p.s.
Just to drive the point home, this post has been on my to-do list for a week. As soon as Omnifocus told me the task was overdue, I felt like I had to have it complete by the time I head to bed tonight. So I’m sitting in Third Coast Comics, making sure I can check this off my list tonight.
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January 28th, 2009 Jeff
A lot of us are busy people. As a result we’ve implemented all manner of different systems to help us stay organized. No matter the system though, we’ve all experienced the vegetables of our to-do lists. It’s like when you were a child and you were supposed to eat your vegetables, but instead of eating them you just pushed them around on the plate hoping they would go away.
I’ve noticed a pattern with the task versions of our vegetables. We push them around in our list management tools but we can’t get into actually taking care of them. In my experience the problem is always the same. We’ve set ourselves up for failure. The explanation is very “GTDish” but if you think about it in an unbiased fashion it makes sense. The problem is simply that you haven’t broken your work down into doable actions. I’ll give you an example.
I’ve been writing a script for a comic book story I’ve had kicking around in my head. For weeks and weeks I’ve had the task “Complete first draft” on my to-do list. It’s not often I have enough time to sit down and bang out a 22 page rough draft. As a result the task stays on my to-do list because when I reviewed my items I never have enough time to tackle this monstrosity of a task.
How I solved the problem may sound a bit like overkill but it worked. The script was targeted to be about 22 pages long. So I broke the “final draft” task into 22 separate items. “Write Page 1, Write Page 2, Write Page 3″ etc became all of my tasks for the first draft project. While an entire draft is a bear, writing a page in a sitting is easily achieved. Before I even realize it the script was done. It doesn’t have to be single page chunks, but chunks that you can manage to do in a single session. For you it might be “write pages 5 – 20″.
When we’re breaking down a task we don’t go far enough. Some items become dwindled down to a level that seems silly, but depending on personal style we may need our items at the baby food level. The level of detail that gets it off your plate is called “widget” mode. Widget mode is when you can sit down and crank through your to do list with minimal brain power or effort involved. The tasks are at a digestible size and don’t seem as daunting. Again a lot of this depends on personal style.
So if you see that item just sitting on your list, try slicing it up into more steps and see if that helps. It’s like mamma always said “Those vegetables aren’t going to take care of themselves, better find a way to eat them”.
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January 3rd, 2009 Jeff
As technology advances, new rules have to be put into place to manage the social rules surrounding the new devices born. We had to do it with telephones, cell phones, e-mail and now we need to do it with self-checkout stations at your local grocery store.
I often use the self-checkout line at my supermarket for quick and easy checkouts. I like the idea of self-checkout but not it’s implications. (That’s a whole different post) But I sit there and watch as we struggle with adapting to this new method of order processing. So instead of just griping about it, I figured I’d come up with the Five Commandments of Self-Checkout.
I. Thou shalt form 1 line.
Everyone has been in a self-checkout line where there are 4 machines clustered together. For some reason people think it’s a brilliant idea that we have a different line for each station. No. Form a single line and the next person in line goes to the newly open machine.
II. Thou shalt not grocery shop for the month and use self-checkout
Self-checkout is designed for speed. Don’t do your thanksgiving day shopping and use self-checkout. It’s slow and it’s annoying.
III. Thou shalt learn self-checkout on thine own time.
If you’re not familiar with how self-checkout works, don’t let your first time with it be when there are 10 people in line behind you and you have 15 items.
IV. Thou shalt not by produce if thine sight is horribly flawed
Sometimes when you purchase items from self-checkout you need to enter codes from produce and things like that. If you can barely read the screen, you probably shouldn’t be using self-checkout.
V. Thou shalt use bills or credit cards for purchases
I once spent 10 minutes waiting for a guy to pay $17 dollars in nickels via self-checkout. That act alone is worthy of death.
As we start to use it more, more rules will evolve but this is an excellent starting list. Abide by these rules and there will be joy. If not people will talk about you. A lot.
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August 8th, 2008 Jeff
Sometimes you’re sitting at your desk and you want to send a text message to someone. Specifically a text message, not an e-mail. Maybe they’re out and you need them to get it right away? Maybe they don’t have e-mail? So the only option is to drag out your phone and play FAT FINGER THOMPSON with your iPhone as your pudgy little fingers try to navigate the touch screen. Well now there is another option.
I say “now” like I haven’t been using Teleflip forever but whatever. Teleflip is a service that allows you to send text messages to your friends via e-mail. Every phone carrier allows you to text a phone via an e-mail address. Each carrier has a slightly different way of formating it though. For example Verizon uses phonenumber@vtext.com. AT&T uses phonenumber@txt.att.net. This is already getting old so you see the dilema. Enter Teleflip.
Teleflip using some voodo magic behind the scenes allows you to send a message to one easy address. phonenumber@teleflip.com. From there it doesn’t matter which carrier your recipient uses, teleflip will forward it to the appropriate address. The recipient receives the message via text along with your e-mail address. Boom. Simple.
Another bonus is that if you don’t have e-mail on your phone (get with the program already) you can sign up with Teleflip so that they convert e-mails from your favorite senders and have them delivered to your phone via text messaging.
Aren’t you glad you read this?
http://www.teleflip.com
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April 10th, 2008 Jeff
LifeHacker.com has put together a list of the best GTD apps out there. (again)
http://lifehacker.com/378062/five-best-gtd-applications#poll_=kTO2QTM
A lot of people hear about these GTD applications and try to just jump right into them. They quickly become confused, frustrated and toss the applications as “crap”. You HAVE TO KNOW THE SYSTEM. So if you haven’t read David Allen’s book yet, you really should check it out first. While these applications are great, how should YOU go about evaluating a GTD tool?
Read the rest of this entry »
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January 21st, 2008 Jeff
Greatest application ever for those who get sucked into the vortex that is the Internet. This little Greasemonkey script (i purposely didn’t link it) removes all hyperlinks from all web pages except Google. With any luck this will discourage or all out prevent you from traveling down the ever expanding rat-hole that is the Internet. Full Article at 43folders.com
You can download No Links Please here
“No Links Please” drains HREFs, discourages web fiddling | 43 Folders
Oh alright..her’es the Grease Monkey link
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November 19th, 2007 Jeff
For those GTD fans out there this is good news! Merlin Mann of 43 folders has been working with the boys over at OmniGroup. So you KNOW this thing should be THE tool. Looking forward to checking it out. My only problem is, I don’t work with Macs on my day job. So I’ll probably be sticking to one of the online variations of GTD. Or I’ll switch jobs.
BIG NEWS OVER HERE PEOPLE. After over 500 sneaky peek releases, which so many of you have been kind enough to give us feedback on, we are finally drawing the OmniFocus early release cycle to a close, with a bright and shiny final release date in mind: January 8, 2008.
The Omni Mouth » OmniFocus public beta/introductory pricing
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November 19th, 2007 Jeff
When we began rolling out a new Gmail code architecture a few weeks ago, we also launched some new features to help improve the speed and convenience of managing email. I’ve been using several of these new additions over the last few weeks, and while they might seem small on their own, they really can add up to save you a lot of time and hassle.
Official Gmail Blog: 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about
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October 31st, 2007 Jeff
I’ve noticed that over the past couple of weeks, I’ve just kind of blindly scrolled through my RSS feeds. I skip over a series of boring articles or articles being reported by 15 different news sites. I scroll through Google Reader ignoring the many many list posts. The Top Apps, The Top, Sites, The Top blah blah blah.
Do we need another evolution in data aggregation? Or do I just need to pick better feeds. Social networking news is also starting to turn to crap as I watch scores and scores of uninteresting useless DIGG articles scroll their way to the top. I remember when everything on DIGG was awesome. (Of course it was only tech stuff then)
Is anyone else experiencing what I’m going through? It’s difficult to put into words, but I guess I’m just getting the feeling that between blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, vidcasts, newspapers, that I’m just getting overwhelmed with info. Now that I’m taking a step back from it all, I’m seeing that most of the info is crap.
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June 19th, 2007 Jeff
You know me, I love GTD tools. Lifehacker has a pretty comprehensive list of GTD tools for use. I’ve used a few of them, most notably KGTD (kinkless is my current GTD implementation on my Mac for personal stuff) and Thinking Rock for my work implementation. Thinking Rock is a solid implementation of GTD but kind of sucks in the performance department. (I mean it IS Java) Check out the here at Lifehacker
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