Not My Mother

I’ve just discovered that since I turned off comments moderation, wordpress has stopped telling me when I have comments. I’m sorry! I don’t mean to ignore anyone and I’m really grateful for you taking the time to comment.

I’m sick of my theme and need to find a new one. (That tiny writing! Argh!) I think the ability to reply to comments definitely needs to be on the list of features.

As you were :-)

We had a compulsory department meeting this afternoon and it was so interesting I added two full pages of things to my to-do list. One is full of finance-related things I need to sort out (from closing old UK bank accounts to working out what the hell my superannuation is worth now, if anything, to archiving MS-Money), and the other is organisation stuff for the house.

I’m pleased both because I don’t think there’s any duplication between this and my ‘official’ to-do list, and because I wrote stuff down without worrying about the ‘perfect’ order to do things in. And I wrote it so neatly! I’ll just add these pages to the notebook. Without rewriting. I tell you, this day is so full of wins. Oh! And at lunchtime I whizzed round and did four different errands, instead of getting all the way to one and deciding I can’t be bothered today.

I’ve come out of the meeting feeling all excited and it’s only partly due to the ra-ra pep talk we just had. Yay me!

So in the last entry I was talking about 43 Folders’ tips on creating an effective to-do list and the concept of a Next Action for each task, and generally getting excited because of its potential to break the big scary tasks into unscary doable chunks. Since then, I’ve been working on creating a to-do list at home.

The problem with that is there is just so much that can go on it. I start with things like put washing away and then start thinking about things like do inventory for contents insurance and end up paralysed at the scale of it. Or, I don’t want to start until I have everything written down. Well, bollocks to that. This time I’m just going to write down what I know about, deal with those things, and add to the list as I go.

So far my list has things on it like this:

1. Dave to fill in tax return form and post
2. fold laundry
3. put laundry away
4. give wedding dress hoop back
5. find out phone pricing plan and switch down a level.

The dress hoop one is an example of a Big Scary Task, the sort that hangs around for weeks because you’re not quite sure how to do it and then gets worse and worse because of the guilt. The thought process goes like this:

“I really must give Kirsty her dress hoop back but I should clean it first. She used that heirloom place — the name is on the bag, I must find that — but what if it’s really expensive? And it’s across town, when will I get time to take it in? I’d use someone else but she’ll probably want it done with them, and she’s going to start asking for it soon and when she finds out I’ve not done anything yet I’ll look like I suck…”

So adding my perfectionism to my fear of talking to people on the phone means I’m never going to tick that off. But it can be broken down into actions, like:

1. find name of place for drycleaning (on bag)
2. phone for quote JUST DO IT
3. take in? or find somewhere else

And every single one of those is doable, even if I have to yell at myself in the comments :-) It’s a silly little example, but I bet if you looked at what was on your to-do list you’d have a fair number like this too.

So this is interesting. At the very least it’s making me feel like I’m in control and therefore able to achieve some things (even if they’re not on the list). There’s still a few things to work out with this. For a start, I need to get in the habit of using the list and checking it daily to pick out a reasonable number of next actions to do. I need a method of tracking daily repeating chores that keeps them off this list, and some sort of cataloguing of tasks would be useful – eg things that can be done in 15 minutes, or things I need the laptop for. It might end up on a spreadsheet, or maybe there’s a tool out there that can do that. I should put a task on my list to check that out.

Another weekend breezed by so fast I am tempted to say, what weekend? Both days we were so busy that absolutely no chores got done at all. Look, I know it’s good to be out doing fun things with friends, but I am obsessed with getting organised right now and want to spend time on it, dammit!

I feel scattered all over the place these days. There is so much I want to focus on, I can’t do it all. At work it’s just as bad. I’ve got three streams of work going on and all are my ‘primary focus’ depending on who you ask. I don’t deal well with multitasking, sad to say; I tend to thrash from one job to the other never getting anything done. Or, they are too complicated and I sit there with spinning wheels trying to work out what to do until the next interruption comes along.

I need to find a way to manage my tasks better, and today I found myself at 43Folders.com, as I have often over the years. I must admit I want to love 43 Folders — it’s full of organisational stuff! But I often end up confused. Some of the posts are a bit philosophical and wordy for my simple brain, others about techy Apple utilities I don’t use. But in between all of that there are some good tips for productivity and organisation and it is definitely worth checking out.

Today I’ve been reading the post Building a Smarter To Do List (Part 1). Merlin Mann says a to do list should be a “smart, actionable and updated accounting” of things he can do today. This is a very good point. Uusally my to do lists are ever growing catalogues of everything that needs doing. I just keep adding to the bottom of it and occasionally crossing things off, but mostly I lose things 3 or 4 pages in. Then I do another brain dump of tasks and start over, all the time worrying about things I’ve forgotten from the old list and hating the duplication. Pretty much I’m doing everything wrong.

So–it sounds like you need to keep a masterlist and extract what you’ll do that day. But it goes further than that. Merlin says that a task on your to-do list should be a physical action which can be accomplished in one sitting. He also talks about a book called Getting Things Done by Dave Allen, and its concept of a Next Action which is the next task to be done on a project. It’s important to break all your tasks down into the Next Action to discover what actually needs doing next.

So you might have ‘Revise Business Case’ on your to-do list, like I do. But Christ, that’s daunting, isn’t it? No wonder you put it off. So you need to break it down into smaller steps, and find the Next Action. Here it is something like ‘email people for feedback’.

This is really useful as I do tend to have large scary things on my list and if I can separate them into smaller steps I might have a chance of actually doing them instead of just fretting. The only change I’d make is to write down as many of the steps as I can ahead of time, otherwise I’ll just faff around wondering what to do next after every. single. step.

I had a great time this morning breaking things down for work and I feel like I got a bit more done as a result. I can’t share anything work-related here but I will be doing the same thing with my at-home to-do list and will report back on that. Meanwhile, Part 2 of ‘Building a Smarter To Do List’ has some very useful thoughts on managing your to-do list (always a problem for me), and it sounds like that Getting Things Done book is something I am going to need.