How to complete 70 tasks in a day: life in task trackers is a good life

I tried to systematically manage tasks, probably 20-25 times. And each attempt failed, as I now understand, for two reasons.

First, in order to set aside time for task management, you need to understand why this is being done.
You start to manage tasks, spend time on this, do fewer tasks, all this starts to accumulate - in the name of what?

Any work is difficult to conduct when you do not understand why. “Ordering life” is not the most adequate goal, since “ordered life” is a rather vague phenomenon. But “reduce anxiety by reducing the level of uncertainty” is a much more specific and better goal, which is quite possible to spend an hour a day on.

Secondly, all the methodologies that I have read describe immediately the final state of the process. “You need to take ToDoIst, break it down into projects, integrate it with a calendar, review tasks for the week, prioritize them…” It’s hard to start doing right away. As in software development, I believe that one should use progressive jpeg method - iteratively.

Therefore, I will go through my “iterations”, and maybe in the same form it will be useful to you. After all, why not use the May holidays to go to work using a new (relatively) paradigm?

And how I came to this, you can read here.

Trello, a couple of lists

We create only 4 lists, use the desktop and mobile applications.

Lists:

• Cases - all the tasks that come to mind, write down here. And write it down as soon as they come to mind. Taking out the trash is a challenge. "Washing the dishes" is a task. “Assign a planning meeting” is a task. Well, and so on. Even the most obvious and/or important things can be forgotten if something sudden happens or just has a hard day.
• Tasks for today - every evening I transfer tasks from the "To-do" board to the "To-do for today" board. If by the evening some of the cases will remain there, this is normal, more on that below. Over time, you begin to understand how many tasks can be on the list so that most of them can be done on the planned day.
• Made today. This board is the main way to reduce the “I didn’t do anything today” anxiety and a good way to further reflect on self-organization. I write down here all the tasks that I did today, not even from the list of planned ones. “I called Vasya about the documents,” he wrote down. “They asked me to sign papers,” he wrote down. “We discussed the contract with Anton,” he wrote. This way, by the end of the day, you will understand what you actually spent time on and what you could not do from these tasks just for the sake of fulfilling the plan.
• Done - A list of all completed tasks. At the beginning or end of the day, I move them from Done Today to Done. In fact, this is such a trash can in which you can simply find completed tasks, and therefore needs regular cleaning.

Trello, "mini-calendar"

At some point, it becomes clear that some tasks are precisely tied in time, and you don’t want to forget about them during the week so as not to schedule something else for this time. The calendar has always been difficult for me, so I added several boards with the names "To-dos for Monday", "To-dos for Tuesday", etc., in which I began to enter time-based tasks.

Thus, when people ask me, “Can we talk on Thursday at 16:00 pm?” - I just go to the appropriate board and see what we have written there for this time. And we must not forget to transfer tasks between lists on time during the week: for example, “things for Thursday” with the onset of Thursday - to “things for today”.

Why not a calendar? For me, it is terribly difficult to use two utilities at the same time. If I use a calendar for this, I will need to go into it, fill it out, go into it regularly to check if I forgot something ...

At this point I have come to the limits of Trello. The main problem was that more than 50 tasks were recorded per day, and there was a rather large pool of tasks tied both to the general list and to lists tied to days. How can I understand that I have already written down the task that I need to do? Duplicates began to appear. How to simultaneously prioritize all tasks for one of the projects? How do you let other people see your calendar plans?

I needed a system that, while maintaining relative ease:

1. Could group tasks by projects.
2. Have a calendar reference (to be done tomorrow), and automatically transfer it to tasks for today, with the onset of the day.
3. Integrate with Google calendar.

This is where I came back to ToDoist, and at this stage it turned out to be the most suitable solution.

Current thread in ToDoist

inbox

I write any incoming tasks in Inbox, which I try to parse right away. Parsing means:

• Determining the date when the task will be completed (for short tasks, I usually set Today, and by the evening I understand when, in fact, it can be done).
• Definition of the project to which the task can be attributed (for statistics and the ability to somehow change the priority of all tasks in the project).

Tasks that come to mind and that do not have to be done in the near future go into projects Uncategorized Personal (“take cupholders in the car”) and Uncategorized Work (“think about when we can arrange a PR strategy session”). In ToDoist, you can assign recurring tasks: so every weekend I have a task to "Parse Uncategorized Personal", and every Monday - "Parse Uncategorized Work".

Calendar integration
ToDoist integrates perfectly with the Google calendar, and in both directions. I share my calendar with my colleagues so they can see when they can't reach me for sure.

At the same time, tasks from the calendar are transferred in the opposite direction: I can say “Serge, look at my time on Friday and write down a meeting there”, which will appear both in the calendar and in ToDoist. So, in fact, I first started using the calendar, while I do not need to create events in it.

Handling non-operational incoming tasks

I do not forcefully rush to do tasks right away, except for those tasks where the fire is obvious. “We urgently need to contact the management of the ABC company, since the server is down, but there is no answer from its employees” - obviously a burning task that cannot be postponed, but “Zhenya, can I call you now to talk about one new project” turns into “ Schedule when you can talk to X about Y”, which will already turn into a task “Tell X that we can talk then” and a task “Talk to X about Y”, already tied to time. Almost any incoming task turns into a "Schedule ..." first.

Task prioritization
All tasks included in the day are not completed. Observing myself, I realized the following (each number will be different, but the main thing is to come to conclusions).

1. For every day, I write about 50-70 tasks.
2. Comfortably for myself (without feeling totally tired at the end of the day) I can do up to 30 tasks.
3. Having done up to 50 tasks, I will get tired, but not critically.
4. I can finish 70 tasks, but after that I will hardly get out of the “workaholism stream”, I will hardly fall asleep and in general I will not be social.

Based on this, I decide what to do today. ToDoist has a prioritization of each task, so in the morning I choose the critical tasks to complete, and I complete the rest based on my ability and desire. Every day I transfer about 40-20 tasks to the next one: what’s interesting is that the tasks for the next day become 60-70 again.

Keeping statistics

I really want to understand in general how much time was spent today on work-related matters, and on which ones. For this I use the application RescueTime, which is on both the phone and the laptop, and Google Maps Location History (yes, I'm not paranoid).

We live outside the city, so the time spent on the road can be put to good use. Now, when I'm not tired, I listen to audiobooks on the road to somehow use these 40 minutes.

I do not yet aggregate the data, creating a kind of personal Data Lake; When the time comes, I'll get to it.

There will be no conclusion

1. The life of a modern person is a large stream of incoming tasks. It will not be possible to reduce it; You have to learn how to manage this flow.
2. Most of the worries are from the uncertainty of the future. If we understand what awaits us in the coming days, there will be significantly less anxiety.
3. For this, you can spend time organizing your day. I know what will happen today, what will happen tomorrow, and I do not forget about those tasks that I used to forget about.
4. Task tracking is not an end in itself, but, if you like, a way of self-education. Things that used to be too lazy to do or things that the hands couldn’t get to in any way become much easier to do. Many people (myself among them) generally feel better when tasks are set from the outside world. Task tracking is a way to set tasks for yourself and learn to live your desires.
5. Work is not an end in itself. The goal is to organize your work schedule in such a way that you have predictable free time when you can take care of yourself, your family, and your interests.

Source: habr.com