Why task managers don't make us productive
Hello! If you have summed up over the past year, you may have discovered that something has remained unfulfilled. Same with me. Therefore, I set the task to thoroughly understand the reasons that prevent me from working productively.
To begin, I decided to analyze the shortcomings of various task managers and create my own application. But not just another task manager - there are already a lot of such applications. The new program should help to plan work properly and not drown in a sea of ​​tasks.
How should this application work?
')
Initial data
We will consider those task managers that allow a person to plan personal affairs. We will not consider team-oriented managers.
Programs for planning cases can be divided into two large groups: some are aimed at working with task lists, others with a calendar and a plan of the day. Todoist, Wunderlist and TickTick can be attributed to the first group, Sunrise Calendar, Google and Yandex calendars to the second group. Some programs allow you to work with the calendar, and with a list of tasks, for example, Essential PIM, TimeMaster and LeaderTask.
For definiteness, we will assume that the user did not create a personal time management system or tried to do it, but without much success.
One application - one time management system
In the descriptions of many programs of the first and second groups it is mentioned that they allow you to plan things using different time management systems. It is implicitly meant that a person has his own system or he has studied and adapted for himself the finished one. But it is much more difficult to do this than using a ready-made program. To do this, you need to read one or several books, select the most important of them and try everything on yourself. Do you have much time for this? I didn't have much time for that.
I believe that my application should not offer the user to independently study any time management technique. I will independently disassemble and test various time management approaches on myself, and what works is implemented in the application. The user should receive a program that will tell him how to plan time and affairs correctly.
Disadvantages of regular task lists
Let us consider why we are not made productive by task managers of the first group, such as Wunderlist and Todoist. These programs allow you to create a list of tasks, specify the priority of the task, add a reminder and comment to it. At the same time to create a task, you just need to write down its name. Our brain is designed so that it is looking for easy ways and tries to minimize the effort to perform any action. If the user has not prepared a system for working with tasks beforehand or has such a system, but does not adhere to it, many tasks will appear in the program for which priorities are not set, deadlines, etc. Then there is a temptation to choose an easy or unimportant task. As a result, the person will be busy, but will not be productive. The main and most important tasks will not be done or you will have to perform them in an emergency way.
Another drawback of the task list is that it grows all the time, and faster than we manage to complete the tasks. This is because adding a task is easy, while analyzing a task requires some effort, and the brain can resist it. Ultimately, the task list becomes so long that the desire to work with it disappears. I had this more than once.
In my opinion, the true problem is deeper: sometimes it seems to us that a busy person is productive. “He is constantly busy, and I sit and do nothing really” - we think, we take the task manager, write down the tasks and immediately begin to perform them. However, to be productive means not to work hard, but to achieve your goals. But to achieve some goals you need to work a lot.
There are many books and articles on the Internet explaining why you need to set goals. In short, without goals, we become “myopic” in planning cases: it seems like we work a lot, but in fact we are marking time. Thus, it is not enough for the program to be able to work only with the task list — there must also be an opportunity to work with goals.
How should the program work with goals?
Let's clarify exactly how the program should work with goals. If there is just a list of goals - this will be equivalent to the usual task list. There will be a temptation to work on those goals that are easier and more like.
All existing and new goals should be subordinated to the vision of what your life will look like in 3-5 years. Otherwise, different goals will pull you in different directions.
Thus, the program must have a section for recording a vision or strategic goals. In this case, it is necessary to put an estimated date for the implementation of this vision.
Unfortunately, recording a vision is not enough. If you do not contact him from time to time, it will be forgotten (checked on yourself). Accordingly, a reminder should work at least once a week to re-read this vision.
Usually there are many goals, and you need to somehow group them. Goals can be grouped by time and areas of life. I will begin with the spheres of life - it seems to me that this is more important.
A person feels control over his life if he is doing well in all areas of life: at work, in family, in relationships with friends, etc. Imbalance in areas of life for a long time leads to problems. For example, if you spend too much time on work, family problems may begin. Accordingly, the program should help monitor areas of life and help avoid excessive imbalance.
By time, goals can be divided into:
Current goals should be subordinated to short-term, those - medium-term, medium-term - long-term, long-term - vision or strategic goals for 3-5 years. Yes, you need to allocate time and write down these goals - the only way to take control of your life and a long list of tasks. Ideally, goals should be set not on a piece of paper, but in a program that will remind you to follow them.
There are certain rules on how to set goals. I know the SMART technique. About her written in detail in Wikipedia . Here I will tell about her extremely briefly:
Finally, goals must be your personal, and not imposed by other people, even if they act out of good intentions. Your life is ...
We talked a lot about goals. Let's summarize the subtotals. If there are many tasks, you need to set goals in time and areas of life and follow them. It is important that the tasks will not be less - you will simply see what to work on, what to wait and what you can simply give up.
Features of planning for a particular day
So, we have goals, and we have a to-do list for the day. It will look something like this:
What is wrong with this list? It does not have an estimate of how much time it takes to spend on each task. If we estimate the time for a task, it usually turns out that we will have time to do less than we would like.
In fact, we got a plan for the day, which is implemented in planners of the second group such as the Sunrise Calendar and Google and Yandex calendars. These planners are usually limited to the fact that you can specify the name of the task and the time for its execution. As in the case of task managers of the first group, this can lead to the fact that a person will fill the time with simple and interesting tasks, pushing important ones to the background. As for the plan of the day itself, in my experience two points prevent them from using it:
Life sometimes behaves too unpredictably, resulting in unplanned tasks and unforeseen deeds. They need to somehow react, do something, and, therefore, to deviate from the plan of the day. From here comes the feeling of loss of flexibility when working with the plan of the day.
However, there is no tragedy in retreating from the plan of the day. The plan of the day is needed in order to know what we wanted to do at any given time. This increases discipline and reduces the risk of the possible postponement of important and urgent matters. If you had to move away from the plan of the day, you need to return to it at the first opportunity and re-plan the rest of the time.
How to make your day plan flexible
I brought out for myself a few rules that make the plan of the day flexible.
First of all, it is necessary to answer the question, which one and only one task needs to be completed, so that the others become not so important or unnecessary. And this task should be devoted most of the day, preferably in the morning.
When working with the plan of the day, all things are divided into 4 parts:
We will call the value of the problem a number from 1 to 4, meaning to which part of the above this task belongs. Accordingly, the day should be divided into 3-4 parts and time should be allotted to each of them. And the program should allow to indicate the value of the task. If most of the day will be devoted to tasks 1 and 2 values, then we will gradually come closer to the realization of our goals.
To increase the flexibility of the daily plan, it is also useful to use a couple of receptions. The first is that instead of a specific task, you can write down in the daily plan what purpose or project you will be working on. When this time comes, we can open tasks for this goal and work on its implementation. In the next article, “The command and control command point,” I will tell you how I managed to organize work on specific goals in one program.
The second technique is that you should not put one task in time close to another. We are not robots and can not instantly switch between them. Put between tasks a short break from 10 to 30 minutes. In this case, it is not scary that you complete some task 5–10 minutes later than planned - almost nothing will suffer from this.
Evaluation of personal productivity
Once we want to be productive, we can not do without feedback. To do this, it is not enough to tick off the completed tasks - you need to see a global picture of how things are going. How productive are we? Where are the weak points? I did not see any solutions for assessing my own productivity, except for Todoist karma. Karma in Todoist is points for completing tasks. These points can not be exchanged for money, they do not allow to save for a discount or free receipt of privileges. For overdue tasks, points are deducted. Karma is the higher, the more tasks performed. But above we have disassembled that the number of completed tasks is not an indicator of human productivity.
Then how to evaluate personal productivity? In my opinion, the main indicator is an internal sense of control over affairs, that everything planned goes according to plan. Ultimately, a person wants to be happy and realize himself. Therefore, it is dangerous to chase after soulless numbers, for example, the number of completed tasks and goals.
More on the feedback I will write later, because it is a big topic with its own nuances.
A little about the benefits of ordinary task managers
The use of lists comes when goals are set and there is a plan for the day. For example, in terms of the day, the task is “Write an article X” and the time is set at 2 o'clock In the task list, you will write smaller specific tasks for writing an article: review something, compare something with something, reflect this point in the output, etc. In the process of work, new tasks will appear. They should not be remembered - for this there is an ordinary task manager.
My program
A few words about my program. It is called My day planning and is located at mydayplanning.com . The goal is not to replace task managers, but to help yourself and you achieve your goals and become productive. While this is a prototype, some features are missing. Implemented the ability to make a plan of the day to day and assign values ​​to tasks. While the program is focused on work in desktop browsers. It looks terrible in mobile browsers, there are no applications for smartphones either. All this has yet to be created.
Please write in the comments how you get the idea to create a helper application in case planning? Is it worth working on? If you can not answer in the comments, my contacts are listed in the profile .
To begin, I decided to analyze the shortcomings of various task managers and create my own application. But not just another task manager - there are already a lot of such applications. The new program should help to plan work properly and not drown in a sea of ​​tasks.
How should this application work?
')
Initial data
We will consider those task managers that allow a person to plan personal affairs. We will not consider team-oriented managers.
Programs for planning cases can be divided into two large groups: some are aimed at working with task lists, others with a calendar and a plan of the day. Todoist, Wunderlist and TickTick can be attributed to the first group, Sunrise Calendar, Google and Yandex calendars to the second group. Some programs allow you to work with the calendar, and with a list of tasks, for example, Essential PIM, TimeMaster and LeaderTask.
For definiteness, we will assume that the user did not create a personal time management system or tried to do it, but without much success.
One application - one time management system
In the descriptions of many programs of the first and second groups it is mentioned that they allow you to plan things using different time management systems. It is implicitly meant that a person has his own system or he has studied and adapted for himself the finished one. But it is much more difficult to do this than using a ready-made program. To do this, you need to read one or several books, select the most important of them and try everything on yourself. Do you have much time for this? I didn't have much time for that.
I believe that my application should not offer the user to independently study any time management technique. I will independently disassemble and test various time management approaches on myself, and what works is implemented in the application. The user should receive a program that will tell him how to plan time and affairs correctly.
| The user does not have to spend time studying time management systems in order to know how to use the program correctly. The program itself should suggest how to plan things correctly. |
|---|
Disadvantages of regular task lists
Let us consider why we are not made productive by task managers of the first group, such as Wunderlist and Todoist. These programs allow you to create a list of tasks, specify the priority of the task, add a reminder and comment to it. At the same time to create a task, you just need to write down its name. Our brain is designed so that it is looking for easy ways and tries to minimize the effort to perform any action. If the user has not prepared a system for working with tasks beforehand or has such a system, but does not adhere to it, many tasks will appear in the program for which priorities are not set, deadlines, etc. Then there is a temptation to choose an easy or unimportant task. As a result, the person will be busy, but will not be productive. The main and most important tasks will not be done or you will have to perform them in an emergency way.
Another drawback of the task list is that it grows all the time, and faster than we manage to complete the tasks. This is because adding a task is easy, while analyzing a task requires some effort, and the brain can resist it. Ultimately, the task list becomes so long that the desire to work with it disappears. I had this more than once.
In my opinion, the true problem is deeper: sometimes it seems to us that a busy person is productive. “He is constantly busy, and I sit and do nothing really” - we think, we take the task manager, write down the tasks and immediately begin to perform them. However, to be productive means not to work hard, but to achieve your goals. But to achieve some goals you need to work a lot.
| Be productive = reach your goals. |
|---|
There are many books and articles on the Internet explaining why you need to set goals. In short, without goals, we become “myopic” in planning cases: it seems like we work a lot, but in fact we are marking time. Thus, it is not enough for the program to be able to work only with the task list — there must also be an opportunity to work with goals.
| A case planning program must be able to work with goals. |
|---|
How should the program work with goals?
Let's clarify exactly how the program should work with goals. If there is just a list of goals - this will be equivalent to the usual task list. There will be a temptation to work on those goals that are easier and more like.
All existing and new goals should be subordinated to the vision of what your life will look like in 3-5 years. Otherwise, different goals will pull you in different directions.
| Goals must be subordinated to the vision of what life will look like in 3-5 years. |
|---|
Thus, the program must have a section for recording a vision or strategic goals. In this case, it is necessary to put an estimated date for the implementation of this vision.
Unfortunately, recording a vision is not enough. If you do not contact him from time to time, it will be forgotten (checked on yourself). Accordingly, a reminder should work at least once a week to re-read this vision.
Usually there are many goals, and you need to somehow group them. Goals can be grouped by time and areas of life. I will begin with the spheres of life - it seems to me that this is more important.
A person feels control over his life if he is doing well in all areas of life: at work, in family, in relationships with friends, etc. Imbalance in areas of life for a long time leads to problems. For example, if you spend too much time on work, family problems may begin. Accordingly, the program should help monitor areas of life and help avoid excessive imbalance.
| The program should help monitor areas of life and warn of long and excessive imbalance. |
|---|
By time, goals can be divided into:
- long-term (more than one year),
- medium term (from three months to one year),
- short term (from two weeks to 3 months),
- current (from one day to two weeks).
Current goals should be subordinated to short-term, those - medium-term, medium-term - long-term, long-term - vision or strategic goals for 3-5 years. Yes, you need to allocate time and write down these goals - the only way to take control of your life and a long list of tasks. Ideally, goals should be set not on a piece of paper, but in a program that will remind you to follow them.
| The program should know the division of goals by time, regularly suggest filling in goals and tracking their implementation. |
|---|
There are certain rules on how to set goals. I know the SMART technique. About her written in detail in Wikipedia . Here I will tell about her extremely briefly:
- S - specific. I do not want to live better, but I want to buy an apartment in Moscow.
- M - measurable (measurable). Not just “I want an apartment”, but “a three-room apartment in a certain area of ​​Moscow near the park 5–10 minutes walk from the metro on the 5th floor with an elevator”.
- A is achievable. To buy an apartment is real, and half of Moscow is unlikely.
- R - relevant (current). Buying an apartment exactly solve your problems?
- T - time-bound (limited in time). How long do you want to achieve the goal?
Finally, goals must be your personal, and not imposed by other people, even if they act out of good intentions. Your life is ...
| The program should be able to monitor the compliance of each goal with different criteria. |
|---|
We talked a lot about goals. Let's summarize the subtotals. If there are many tasks, you need to set goals in time and areas of life and follow them. It is important that the tasks will not be less - you will simply see what to work on, what to wait and what you can simply give up.
| Setting goals does not reduce the number of tasks. You get control over them: see what you need to do first of all, what can be postponed, and what can be discarded. |
|---|
Features of planning for a particular day
So, we have goals, and we have a to-do list for the day. It will look something like this:
- Task 1
- Task 2
- Task 3 (and so on)
What is wrong with this list? It does not have an estimate of how much time it takes to spend on each task. If we estimate the time for a task, it usually turns out that we will have time to do less than we would like.
| The correct task list contains an estimate of the time for each of them. |
|---|
In fact, we got a plan for the day, which is implemented in planners of the second group such as the Sunrise Calendar and Google and Yandex calendars. These planners are usually limited to the fact that you can specify the name of the task and the time for its execution. As in the case of task managers of the first group, this can lead to the fact that a person will fill the time with simple and interesting tasks, pushing important ones to the background. As for the plan of the day itself, in my experience two points prevent them from using it:
- rarely can you follow the plan of the day
- sometimes there is a feeling of loss of flexibility in working with tasks.
Life sometimes behaves too unpredictably, resulting in unplanned tasks and unforeseen deeds. They need to somehow react, do something, and, therefore, to deviate from the plan of the day. From here comes the feeling of loss of flexibility when working with the plan of the day.
However, there is no tragedy in retreating from the plan of the day. The plan of the day is needed in order to know what we wanted to do at any given time. This increases discipline and reduces the risk of the possible postponement of important and urgent matters. If you had to move away from the plan of the day, you need to return to it at the first opportunity and re-plan the rest of the time.
How to make your day plan flexible
I brought out for myself a few rules that make the plan of the day flexible.
First of all, it is necessary to answer the question, which one and only one task needs to be completed, so that the others become not so important or unnecessary. And this task should be devoted most of the day, preferably in the morning.
| For each day, choose one and only one most important task and allocate the main time to it. |
|---|
When working with the plan of the day, all things are divided into 4 parts:
- affairs performed directly to achieve goals in any area of ​​life;
- cases that indirectly help to achieve goals (for example, professional development for a programmer);
- cases that we cannot but do, but they do not meet the goals (we need to eat, drink, sleep; sometimes there are sudden breakdowns that need to be fixed by ourselves);
- affairs which performance leads away you from achievement of goals (for example, viewing of the TV or entertainment sites on the Internet instead of work on the project).
We will call the value of the problem a number from 1 to 4, meaning to which part of the above this task belongs. Accordingly, the day should be divided into 3-4 parts and time should be allotted to each of them. And the program should allow to indicate the value of the task. If most of the day will be devoted to tasks 1 and 2 values, then we will gradually come closer to the realization of our goals.
| Most of the day should be spent on task 1 and value 2. |
|---|
To increase the flexibility of the daily plan, it is also useful to use a couple of receptions. The first is that instead of a specific task, you can write down in the daily plan what purpose or project you will be working on. When this time comes, we can open tasks for this goal and work on its implementation. In the next article, “The command and control command point,” I will tell you how I managed to organize work on specific goals in one program.
The second technique is that you should not put one task in time close to another. We are not robots and can not instantly switch between them. Put between tasks a short break from 10 to 30 minutes. In this case, it is not scary that you complete some task 5–10 minutes later than planned - almost nothing will suffer from this.
Evaluation of personal productivity
Once we want to be productive, we can not do without feedback. To do this, it is not enough to tick off the completed tasks - you need to see a global picture of how things are going. How productive are we? Where are the weak points? I did not see any solutions for assessing my own productivity, except for Todoist karma. Karma in Todoist is points for completing tasks. These points can not be exchanged for money, they do not allow to save for a discount or free receipt of privileges. For overdue tasks, points are deducted. Karma is the higher, the more tasks performed. But above we have disassembled that the number of completed tasks is not an indicator of human productivity.
Then how to evaluate personal productivity? In my opinion, the main indicator is an internal sense of control over affairs, that everything planned goes according to plan. Ultimately, a person wants to be happy and realize himself. Therefore, it is dangerous to chase after soulless numbers, for example, the number of completed tasks and goals.
More on the feedback I will write later, because it is a big topic with its own nuances.
A little about the benefits of ordinary task managers
The use of lists comes when goals are set and there is a plan for the day. For example, in terms of the day, the task is “Write an article X” and the time is set at 2 o'clock In the task list, you will write smaller specific tasks for writing an article: review something, compare something with something, reflect this point in the output, etc. In the process of work, new tasks will appear. They should not be remembered - for this there is an ordinary task manager.
My program
A few words about my program. It is called My day planning and is located at mydayplanning.com . The goal is not to replace task managers, but to help yourself and you achieve your goals and become productive. While this is a prototype, some features are missing. Implemented the ability to make a plan of the day to day and assign values ​​to tasks. While the program is focused on work in desktop browsers. It looks terrible in mobile browsers, there are no applications for smartphones either. All this has yet to be created.
Please write in the comments how you get the idea to create a helper application in case planning? Is it worth working on? If you can not answer in the comments, my contacts are listed in the profile .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/297926/
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