Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions

Posted by Ken
May 22, 2014 at 01:50 AM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Instead of doing
>that, I now try to make a list of desired outcomes. As a simple example:
>If I want to bake a cake for my wife’s birthday, instead of making a
>list of ingredients, and other steps, I will just make note, “Cake for
>Amy’s birthday.” As long as I remember that, my brain can manage the
>rest. As a work-related example, I will just write, “Catalog mailed by
>end of March.” All the many steps that go into that project, I can
>manage in my head. Sometimes I make lists of steps if I need to think
>through the process. But I usually don’t bother creating a check list
>from that.
> >I guess the gist of what I’m saying is that I used to spend a lot of
>time and energy trying to manage my time. This turned out to be
>counter-productive, absorbing time and creating stress.
> >Steve Z.

Steve,

I could have written an almost identical post for a number of years, and I think that much of what you said applies to many of us. Unfortunately, a bad combination of things has changed the landscape on me, and I am finding that this approach needs a bit of modification. The following is not necessarily a rebuttal, but rather an explanation of the changes and the need to change my MO (which was very similar to yours). First, my memory is feeling a bit taxed these days. Not in a cognitive or developmental sense, but just in the sheer amount of information that passes through my brain, and the ever increasing portion that requires some kind of future attention or action.

Using my work as a more detailed example, the project and program outcomes I manage are requiring more steps to accomplish, and the number of outcomes has also increased. I know that I can only do so much in a day, but if I do not write down all the newly spawning tasks that seem to multiply daily, it is quite easy for me to forget an important one that is critical and/or time sensitive. And, as my time is often crunched because of the constant time vampires which are very hard to control or minimize, I want to focus my remaining available time on the most appropriate tasks, which are unfortunately also multiplying at too rapid a rate. In short, the methods that you have described above, and which I have more or less implemented over the years, and still do to a certain degree, cannot handle this increase in. If I could remember everything in need of attention or needed to accomplish an outcome, things would be fine. But, that does not seem to be the case.

And the part that is truly frustrating to me, and I am sure many here can relate to, is that while I understand how many of these task managers work in theory, I find many of them hard to actually use on a daily basis. Few have really exceptional UI’s, so despite all of their search, sort and tagging capabilities, most have some serious limitation in how they present their data. As stated earlier, I am trying to see if I can get comfortable with Asana, but it has its challenges in how it presents metadata for things like subtasks.

Having said all that, there is a part of me that wonders how much further along I might be if I just worked and did not spend any time trying to organize/reorganize/prioritize.

—Ken