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Sort of a poll: What is your favorite task manager/to do app?
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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.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 4, 2019 at 10:26 AM
Ha, fascinating insights, Graham. I am currently adjusting my own way of working in very similar ways.
After much thought and some experimentation, I’m dumping all the subscription-based apps I was using to manage my time.
I’ve invested in a couple of notebooks to jot down ideas/must-do tasks (for later transfer to software if necessary - otherwise “just do it”, as you say).
I’ve created my own task management system in Apple Numbers.
This has the huge advantage of being optimised to my own way of working, preferred methods of visualisation etc. It wouldn’t have been possible until now, mind you, because of the new “grouping” feature in Numbers, which allows me to create fold-away sections for notes (and any other specific data, such as contact names, start dates and so on). Oh, to explain that, I should specify that each task is a micro-table (one of Numbers’ most powerful features - the fact that tables are only a small part of what the software can do). So I have multiple types of micro-tables for different kinds of task or notes.
The system is slightly cumbersome, in that I have to keep my task templates in a separate tab so I can copy and paste them into the relevant “to do” tab (classic GTD setup for those, incidentally, but with timing bands added to the “TODAY” tab, so I can rough-schedule tasks into my day). Obviously copying and pasting takes a little time - but it also helps you to concentrate on exactly what you want to do with the task.
Reason for this radical revamp? I just couldn’t cope with the vast lists of tasks that inevitably build up in all standard task managers, no matter how well designed they are. Those lists are so annoying! So many brain cells die as you scan down them over and over again.
The Numbers setup means I can highlight tasks any way I like; I can position them on the infinite canvas that is a given Numbers tab anywhere I like; I can modify the task layout spontaneously, or create new templates if I feel like it. I can include diagrams if I like. I can create notes anywhere I like (either in the task or elsewhere); which brings me to the one major limitation of Numbers - the lack of any option to link to tables/worksheets/other objects across a Numbers workbook. External links, yes, internal links, no. This is a big weakness, and I’m hoping they’ll address it soon.
As for tagging - yes, I do that sometimes. No, Numbers doesn’t display groups of tagged items like other task managers, but the search engine is so powerful you can zoom through items that have been assigned the same tag very quickly and easily. I keep a separate tab with tags on it, just for reference.
So it’s all a bit “manual”, and I could probably use a database (Ninox, Tap Forms) to do the same things. But that would be so much more complicated and so much less flexible.
And best of all? No more expensive subscriptions! I’m thinking of transferring all my journaling to Numbers as well… Apple Numbers is, after all, free.
Another wacky change of tack from Bill!
Posted by Franz Grieser
Feb 4, 2019 at 05:06 PM
Thanks, Graham.
Sounds familiar. One of the great bonusses of working on my own and in my home office is: no more meetings. Almost no meetings. If I go to a meeting that’s an opportunity to leave the office and socialize.
What I do not do: Work every single day. I learnt (the hard way) that I need 2-3 weeks off once a year and that I need a few days off per month (mostly weekends because my better half does not work during weekends).
Posted by Ken
Feb 7, 2019 at 04:02 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>Maybe this article is thinking of todo lists too dogmatically. For me a
>todo list is not a list of todos that must get done, but a space for
>thinking about them, organising them, working them out as problems,
>archiving them, and the vast majority of them will never get done, and
>that’s fine, in fact the whole purpose of the system (prioritisation).
Well said. I’ll never get everything done that needs to get done as my lists seem to be “evergreen”. But, I need to know what is urgent and needing immediate attention, and this process helps identify those items. And while I know some folks take joy in scheduling every minute of their day, it would kill me. I need as much flexibility in my day as possible, both to work with my natural productivity peaks and valleys when they hit, and to allow space for the unexpected. It is not for everyone, but it works for me.
—Ken
Posted by nathanb
Feb 7, 2019 at 09:05 PM
Ken wrote:
Dr Andus wrote:
>>Maybe this article is thinking of todo lists too dogmatically. For me a
>>todo list is not a list of todos that must get done, but a space for
>>thinking about them, organising them, working them out as problems,
>>archiving them, and the vast majority of them will never get done, and
>>that’s fine, in fact the whole purpose of the system (prioritisation).
>
>Well said. I’ll never get everything done that needs to get done as my
>lists seem to be “evergreen”. But, I need to know what is urgent and
>needing immediate attention, and this process helps identify those
>items. And while I know some folks take joy in scheduling every minute
>of their day, it would kill me. I need as much flexibility in my day as
>possible, both to work with my natural productivity peaks and valleys
>when they hit, and to allow space for the unexpected. It is not for
>everyone, but it works for me.
>
>—Ken
Really good descriptions by Ken and Dr Andus. 90% of what I put into lists never gets done because a big reason the lists exist is to dump new ‘maybes’ in there to see where they rank. Most the time, the new shiny ideas don’t look as shiny when stacked up against all the rest. My lists are constantly in motion where new things are dumped somewhere in the middle, the things rising towards the top are being scheduled and checked off, and the things sinking to the bottom being deleted or sent off to ‘someday/maybe’ purgatory.
In my colorful history of trying to keep a useful ‘digital brain’, I’ve made attempts to make a defined schedule where the day/week is scripted. I’ve found that if I want to guarantee that’s what I WON’T do, it’s by trying to schedule tasks anywhere past a relatively loose agenda for today only.
I’m starting to realize that there is a fundamental difference in mindset of those who view lists as “I’m definitely doing this, why else would I put it on a list?” and “hey this MIGHT be a good idea, lets see where it stacks up against my other intentions”. One is black and white, you are committed to do it or not. The other is a spectrum, where every item’s value is relative and constantly subject to re-ranking based on new info.
I won’t get into which mindset is better. Both are valuable and necessary in any thriving organization. I’m a project engineer, my job is to change systems. Executive’s jobs are to RUN existing systems. My focus is on expanding possibilities, their focus is on executing current reality. It absolutely makes sense that I think of lists as constantly fluid and tentative whereas others see them as hard maps of commitment. It’s important to recognize that the majority of those that move up within companies are executives. Therefore, those of us who think of lists as fluid need to recognize this can be mis-interpreted as flaky and unreliable behavior by hard-listers.