Last week, I discussed the core problem that I have regarding tracking the things that I have to do. The specific question that I asked was:
What do I need to do to keep track of all the things that I need to do, and what tools can I use to make sure nothing falls through the cracks?
I spent a great deal of time thinking about the tools at my disposal, and made a very concerted effort to consider how best to use the various tools that I’ve identified to help me on my quest to make sure I’m doing the right things when they need to be done. I plan on writing about each of the tools individually, but for now, I’m focusing on the overview. The specific tools are:
Each one of these tools has provided me with a variety of methods for capturing, assessing, tracking, and otherwise managing my tasks. Some are very capable, albeit complex, solutions. Others are much more basic. Some have great user interfaces on all three of my main devices (desktop, tablet, and smartphone)…some, not so much. And each one has strengths and weaknesses in the user communities that surround and support them.
I’ve decided that for now, I need to concentrate on the things that I need to do in the moment. Those things that need to be done right now or something bad will happen. You know, stuff like “pickup 6th grader after school” (mostly because I hate that call from the office asking how she’s getting home). While that’s a task that happens five days a week, it’s not something that automatic for me. I am either waiting for 3:15 to come around to pick her up, and am ready to leave the house at 2:30, or I’m busy doing other things and suddenly have to scramble to get to the school. In either case, I lost productive time to having to remember (and be aware) of when she needs to be picked up. That doesn’t even take into account the numerous early release days, when the school dismisses at 1:00pm. To give you some idea of how confusing it is for me, I had to go to my calendar, search for “Early Release” and then verify what time the kids actually get out on those early release days. Unfortunately, I have to do that every time they have an early release. I just can’t seem to keep it into my head that they get out at 1pm. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is.
Of course, that’s a rock-solid calendar-type activity. It’s in my Google calendar (on the School calendar, actually). I’ve set four reminders (pop-up on computer 3 days prior, pop-up 1 day prior, SMS 4 hours prior, and e-mail two hours prior). I’ve discovered that if I use reminders in all three forms (pop-up, SMS, and e-mail), there is a much higher likelihood that I will actually see at least one of them. Yeah, I sound like a total ditz, but remember that whole hectic thing? Yeah, it’s very real for me every day of my life.
There are other things that fall more appropriately into the project category that David Allen talks about. The simplest explanation of a project is anything that takes more than one step to complete. Of course, with that definition, even picking the kids up from school could be a project (walk to car, get in car, start car, drive to school, curse at other drivers, park car, wait for kid, help load trombone into car, etc.). Of course, there are lots of things that really are projects that we simply treat as tasks, because if we treated everything like the “Pickup Kids from School” project, our heads would explode. Then nobody would be around to answer the call from the school asking about where little Susie’s ride home was. That would look bad, and we surely don’t want to look bad.
In my world, projects are things that not only take a bunch of steps, those steps are also most likely separated by a span of time. A recent example is my battle with the repair of our kitchen freezer. I decided that I’m (1) cheap and (2) capable of freezer repair. That meant that I had to diagnose what was wrong with the freezer. That involved a disassembly of the interior of the freezer. The diagnosis led to the ordering of parts. The parts took a while to arrive. Once they arrived, I had to remove one faulty part and replace it. Then I needed to wait for the freezer to come to temperature (e.g. do what a freezer does and get really cold). Then I needed to ascertain whether the other part(s) needed to be installed too. Finally, if my freezer repair skills were up to snuff, I have to reassemble the freezer. The to be safe, we’ll load it with a few lower value items and see if my repair was enough. So the Kitchen Freezer Repair fell into the project category because of how many things needed to be done and the amount of time that it would take, including waiting for parts to arrive, the freezer to freeze, etc.
This seemed like a perfect job for ToodleDo. I dutifully entered the project, and even gave it a start date. I carefully entered all the tasks associated with the project, and even made guesses as to how long they would take. I gave the project a priority. And then I set about the first task from the project (Diagnosing the problem). I figured out what was not working as best I could, and I even managed to locate the part and order it. I carefully updated the task Wait for Repair Parts with the estimated shipment arrival date.
And as always, that’s where I got stuck. The project was on hold until the parts arrived. I was going to get a reminder that they should arrive on the arrival date, because I’d set that up in ToodleDo. But until that reminder, the project was to just sit there. The reminder came a couple of days later, and I checked the tracking status on the package from one of the four e-mails I’d received from the vendor. The package had been delayed a day, so I continued to wait.
At this point, I had info on the repair in my calendar, e-mail, and ToodleDo. Honestly, it was too much, and I let the ToodleDo info languish. When the parts arrived, I didn’t have time to install them in the freezer, so they sat on the kitchen table (as a very obvious reminder that the work needed to be done). The freezer door was standing open in the kitchen as another reminder (and as a way to keep it from smelling so badly). Tools were scattered on the kitchen counter because I was “going to be doing the repair really soon now”. And there everything sat for nearly a week. I didn’t make the time to do the repair, despite all the not-so-subtle reminders from my wife and family about the nature of the disruption I’d caused in the household.
If I was an inveterate ToodleDo user, I would have entered the arrival date of the parts, which would have allowed me to complete that task, and the Next Action task would have been activated (namely, Install Parts in Freezer). I would then have been able to look at my Next Actions list and realized that I had enough time, tools, energy, etc. to do the task. Then I would have installed the parts and we would have been our our way to Frozen Food storage. But I’m not enough of a dedicated user, at least not yet. I had to leave all sorts of reminders scattered throughout the kitchen. I took the gentle nudges from my wife and family in stride, and promptly ignored them.
I’m not sure what tipped the scales, but eventually I installed the defroster sensor. I turned the freezer back on and let it start doing it’s thing. Through trial and error, and the creation of several tasks (some of which made it into ToodleDo, and some of which never did), I got to the point where I realized that I needed a different thermometer to determine if the freezer was working. We’re headed out to pick it up later this afternoon. Of course, my only reminder is the item I put on the shopping list…that is conspicuously not in ToodleDo.
I really do want to use ToodleDo for what it’s good at, but the interface is sufficiently cumbersome, especially on my iPhone that I keep holding back. I also keep getting caught up in the minutiae of recording tasks to be done, updating the estimated times for tasks, the locations where those tasks can be done, etc. This is another reason that I don’t use ToodleDo as much as I’d like to. While there are other tools out there, I haven’t really found one that is any better for project management.
But that left me with a gaping hole in my arsenal. I need to know what to do today. My oldest daughter found a tool called Wunderlist. This is a website with an accompanying app. It’s a slick todo list solution that even allows for subtasks. Wunderlist appealed to both of us because of it’s simplicity. It’s not really much of a step up from a simple list on paper…except that it can follow me on my iPhone. This is key, because I’m juggling so many activities and tasks that I need to refer back to my list of things to do quite regularly. I tried to do this in ToodleDo for a while, but it was just too cumbersome.
So at this point, I’m putting my projects and higher level, longer term tasks and activities into ToodleDo and then using Wunderlist for my in the moment items. Wunderlist does lack the concept of context, which means that “clean the bathroom” and “pickup bagels at the grocery store” both show up on my list with equal importance, no matter where I am. The beauty of context is that it can filter on where you are. So when I’m out running errands (like picking up my 6th grader), I can also be reminded that I need those bagels from the grocery store before the family stages a revolt. I’ve tried a couple of workarounds for Wunderlist, but I’m not quite settled on anything yet.
Google Calendar, Toodledo, Wunderlist, and Evernote (more in a second) are all capable of generating reminders for me. This is key, especially if those reminder can be pushed to my phone. I’ve become totally dependent on my iPhone for managing my tasks, and the fact that I can get reminders for things on that device is a key component to my getting better at managing my time and avoiding so many things slipping through the cracks. Having those reminders follow me also allows me to use a wide variety of tools and not worry about having to check each one’s interface. I can put a reminder into any of the applications and then let the system handle the rest. I get reminders when I need them. It’s almost like magic.
As I have alluded to, I also use Evernote for tracking purposes. I discovered that I could use the Evernote Clipper to capture things from the internet and send them to Evernote. This allows me to grab all sorts of interesting things for later reading or processing. In the past, I’ve used a number of different tools to do this, but with each one, either the capture interface was great and the reading interface was horrible, or the capture stunk but reading worked great. Evernote is the first tool that’s allowed me to both capture and read/review/process fairly efficiently. Unfortunately, the differences in the interface in Evernote between the Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad versions has driven me nuts. I keep running into actions that I know how to do on one platform that I can’t figure out on the other(s). That has hampered my usage somewhat, but I’m beginning to figure out how to do everything I need to do on every platform. I’ve taken to using the Mac for most of my capture and the iPhone for most of my review. It’s working OK for me at present, but I’m looking to improve my usage over time.
I’ve read a couple of books about using Evernote in my task tracking, but at this point I haven’t used it nearly as much as I had initially anticipated. Right now, Evernote is really acting as a repository for things that I find on the web as well as my always-on electronic filing cabinet. Evernote provides me with one place to keep at the things that I want to have available to me wherever I am. Unfortunately, I already had a very robust physical (paper) and electronic filing system on our network, and I haven’t yet figured out how to get that entire backlog into Evernote. And frankly I don’t know if I want everything that I’ve previously filed in there. I need to consider that some more, but that’s a topic for another day.
The final tool that I’ve discovered, but haven’t really used as much as I’d like is TheBrain. This is a combination website/app that allows you to capture thoughts and then link those thoughts together. Their video tutorials do a great job explaining how the system is designed to work. The different terminology is quite daunting at first, but once I got the hang of it, it made a lot of sense. The process of totally confused to productive user took about a week of on-again, off-again usage. But the struggle was worth it. TheBrain allows you to create Mind Maps that visually express the relationships between things. Imagine having a whiteboard that’s with you all the time, with the ability to zoom in on a particular area that you’re thinking about. Honestly, the best place to go to understand the mechanics are TheBrain Tutorials. They are great, and very short. This allowed me to watch a bit, try the concepts out, then go back for more. You should consider checking them out
I’m using TheBrain somewhat akin to the projects that I’ve got in ToodleDo. I’ll have a thought (e.g. Clean the Garage) and then a dozen other cleaning projects come to mind. I can link them all under the higher-level thought House Cleaning and then they are organized in the same way my brain works. Of course, as soon as a couple of my kids saw myBrain on the Mac’s screen they began to worry about how insane I must really be. It looked like a total mish mash, and some of the links only make sense to me (e.g. Clean the Garage was linked to Rebuild the Outside Shed). The links make sense to me though, and that’s all that matters!
So all told, I’m juggling my time between five solutions for one problem. That seems like it may be too many, but I’m simply not sure. While there is some overlap between the tools, each has strengths and weaknesses that I have yet to assess fully. This coming week, my plan is to delve into each of the tools more fully and try to assess what each is most useful for. I don’t know if these are even the best tools for the job(s) at hand, so I may spend some time investigating other solutions. But that’s a big may. Right now, I think I have the right tools, or if anything, too many tools.
What about you? What tools are you using to manage the things that you have to do on a daily, weekly, and longer-term basis? What works for you and what doesn’t?
