Sort of a poll: What is your favorite task manager/to do app?

Posted by Graham Rhind
Feb 4, 2019 at 08:57 AM

Franz Grieser wrote:
Graham Rhind wrote:
>>and yet still having oceans of time every day to
>>work on new projects, whilst others around me lose their heads in their
>>panic. And being envied by those self same “successful” people for the
>>level of efficiency I achieve, which tickles me every time I hear it.
>>
>>Nope, I’m not special. Just efficient.
>>
>>Not that Forbes would be interested ...
> >You know I am curious. Tell us: How do you do it?
>Seriously, I am not Forbes, I am interested.

Ah, I wondered if anybody would ask that – it’s something I ask myself regularly. I wish I knew.

It might have something to do with my own psychology and being on the autism scale. When I worked in businesses, whilst everybody else was crowded around the coffee machine bemoaning how much work they had to do, I just did it.

A lot probably has to do with having been able to create my own working environment for the last twenty years. I work alone, so I don’t have a lot of wasted interaction with colleagues to mess up my days. I find meetings to be one of the most wasteful and inefficient parts of business, and they drive me up the wall. From experience, most participants in meetings actually get about 5 minutes of useful information or interaction from any meeting lasting 60 minutes – a really bad return on the time investment. When I e-mail a question to a customer, I get irritated when the response it to organise a conference call so that they can spend 30 minutes providing the answer that they could have provided in 3 minutes by answering the e-mail. I can bat away requests for meetings from junior staff, but when those high-flying “successful” staff demand one, I have to comply, but it messes up my days and really vacuums up the time – it explains a lot about how those people spend 12 hours per day working and achieve no more than I do.

I work on all my projects (work and personal) about 3 to 4 hours per day, but that’s every day – weekends, public holidays – they’re just days to me – and I don’t do holidays. I stop working when I want and work any time it suits me (which, admittedly, tends to be very regular, which is more efficient). Those 3 to 4 hours are pure work, and is probably more than my customers who spend 10 hours in the office but spend most of those being dragged from meeting to meeting, which may be why they are surprised at how much I get done.

My work is based on knowledge creation and dissemination, and a lot of the projects I create for myself have to do with knowledge acquisition, such as learning a language, so they have no end as such. For that reason I make sure that I dose the work into small pieces – there’s no point trying to learn everything at once. If there is a target date, I make sure that it’s far enough away that it creates no stress. At the moment, for example, I am learning Visual Basic so that I can implement squash tournament organisation software in Excel. As the end date is August I know that I can do this in small increments and still meet the deadline.

I do follow some simple rules. If a task (such as writing this response) won’t take long to complete (e.g. less than 15 minutes, just as a guideline, but it depends on my mood) then I do it immediately. I find it very unhelpful and inefficient to allow small tasks to build up in a backlog – that has a stultifying psychological effect too.

I actually spend far too much time staring out of the window and wondering what to do next than I should do, and I often think I must be wasting huge amounts of time until I enumerate what I have actually produced. I’m a horribly boring individual, but that’s just the way it goes!

As for my setup: my diary and dated tasks are on paper (Filofax Heritage A5, for those interested), using inserts that I design and print myself (so that they exactly suit my way of working – another added efficiency bonus). My undated and repeating tasks are in a highly underrated program called Sciral Consistency. The knowledge I collect and disseminate is in ConnectedText, and project-related knowledge is split between The Brain (because I can easily synchronise that with other computers) and notebooks (the paper variety). My archive knowledge is in OneNote. I carry around an A7 notebook for any ideas of tasks I need to do whilst on the move. I have a whole host of other software I’d like to use (Everdo, Hyperplan, Goalscape…), but I need to get them to work in my way instead of vice versa, so they’re on the reserve bench.