Sometimes it’s hard to get your head wrapped around all the things you need to do. There are too many things, in too many areas, to attack everything. But without some sense of structure, nothing gets done.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, it’s the problem that I’ve been facing most of my adult life. Honestly, until recently it was a problem that was kicking my butt. Too many things fell through the cracks until they became emergencies. I didn’t want to live that way anymore, so I started actively searching for ways to organize my life. That’s when my pursuit of personal productivity really started to become something of an obsession.
I’ll freely admit that I’m still obsessed with the idea of personal productivity. I read way too much about it. I listen to a load of podcasts on the topic. And I follow a huge number of people on social media who discuss the topic of personal productivity.
Over the years, I’ve discovered one framework that has helped me immensely. There are all sorts of names for this sort of framework, but I call it Areas of Focus or AOF (because I’m in love with acronyms!).
Over the past few years, I’ve discovered I work best when I separate my life into five Areas of Focus:
- Business
- Family
- Financial
- Household
- Personal
Since the start of the year, I’ve been striving to capture all the tasks that come to mind. This sounds like an easy thing to do, but it turns out it’s actually pretty difficult. In fact, I’ve had to add reminders throughout my day to nudge me into clearing all those tasks I’ve thought of out of my head and into a capture place. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m getting better at it.
Once I’ve got the tasks captured, I try to take a little time every day or two and sort them from the general capture area into one of the five areas of focus. I don’t spend too much time thinking about what project a task belongs to, but rather what area of my life it should reside in. So when I think, “oh, I need to fill the car up with gas”, that get’s captured. Then it gets sorted into the Household category. When I realize I need to pay the electric bill, it goes into the Financial category. While those are pretty mundane examples, there’s a lot of power in this classification. And it gets better when there are tasks that are done very infrequently.
For instance, after several years of destroying hoses because we left them hooked up to the spigots through the first freeze in the Fall, I added a recurring task to my Household AOF to remind me to disconnect the hoses, roll them up, and stow them in the shed. The reminder comes on the first of October, with a second more stringent reminder on the 20th. The first freeze is usually around the end of the month, so I’ve got plenty of time to actually do the task of storing the hoses before they’ll get destroyed. And it’s amazing, in the three years I’ve been using this system…I haven’t mangled a single hose!
More importantly, I’ve got that task setup so I don’t have to think about it. It just comes to me when I need it. And because I review my Areas of Focus on a weekly basis to see what things are coming up that I might not have thought of…it’s right there when I need it.
Looking in Todoist, my task manager of choice, I’ve got nearly one hundred of these atomic tasks. And they’re setup to pop up throughout the year. In fact, because Todoist will let me set reminders with the tasks, I’ve even got some that are tied to a location. So I get reminded to check my Mom’s sump pump every time I’m at her house. While it’s not something I think of all the time, and certainly don’t need to do on every visit, it’s kind of neat to get the reminder. Especially the time I discovered the motor had burned out. We got the sump replaced the week before a huge rainstorm that would’ve flooded the basement if the sump pump had been inoperable. Talk about the magic of my productivity system!
As I mentioned above, I’m working really hard to capture all the tasks I think of. Then they get sorted into the AOFs on a regular basis. At the very least, I do this as part of my weekly review. That’s also the time I review the tasks I didn’t get accomplished the prior week, and figure out when they’re going to get done. And if I discover something that’s now expired…I simply delete the task.
One of the dangers of having so many tasks on a single list is that it’s hard to attack them in a systematic way. By breaking the tasks down into Areas of Focus it’s possible to make a little bit of progress on getting them organized. I further group tasks of a similar sort together into projects.
For example, the stowing hoses for Winter task is actually part of a project for tidying up for Winter. I’ve got things like check the status of snow shovels, verify we have driveway salt, and put out driveway reflectors inside that project. The idea is tasks that fall into the same realm are grouped together. Then when I’m focusing on doing household chores during the course of the week, one of the projects I’ll see is Tidying up for Winter. That reminds me that I need to do some things before it’s too cold.
By grouping tasks together in projects within the AOFs, I’ve got a fighting chance of actually doing them. There’s nothing worse than starting the day with a list the length of your arm and knowing you won’t get to everything on it. It’s even worse when there is no organization. The beauty of the Areas of Focus is they help me concentrate my efforts in a particular place. Plus, with the ebb and flow of life, there are going to be times when one AOF takes precedence over the others. Having a small number of areas allows me to dip in and check on the others, even if I’m focusing primarily on another one.
Have you thought about grouping your tasks and projects into Areas of Focus? If you have I’d love to hear what your AOFs are. If you haven’t now might be a good time to start doing that to help you get a handle on everything you’ve got going in life!
