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

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

First, in order to allocate time for task management, you need to understand why it is being done.
You start to lead tasks, spend time on it, do less tasks, it all starts to accumulate - in the name of what?
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Any work is difficult to conduct when you do not understand why. “To streamline life” is not the most adequate goal, since “ordered life” is a rather vague phenomenon. But "to reduce the level of anxiety, reducing the level of uncertainty" - the goal is much more specific and better, which can be spent an hour a day.

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

Therefore, I will go through my “iterations”, and maybe in the same way it will be useful to you. In the end, 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 pair of lists

We create only 4 lists, we use a desktop and mobile application.



Lists:

• Cases - all the tasks that come to mind, write here. And write immediately, as soon as they come to mind. “Throwing out trash” is a challenge. “Washing the dishes” is a challenge. "Assign a planning meeting" is a task. Well, and so on. Even the most obvious and / or important things can be forgotten if something unexpected happens or just had a hard day.
• Cases for today - every evening I transfer cases from the “Cases” board to the “Cases for today” board. If in the evening some of the cases will remain there - this is normal, more about 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 scheduled day.
• Made today. This board is the main way to reduce anxiety “I haven’t done anything today” and a good way for further reflection about self-organization. I write down here all the tasks that I have done today, not even from the list of planned ones. “I called Vasya about the documents,” he wrote. “They asked to sign papers,” he wrote. "We discussed the contract with Anton" - recorded. Thus, by the end of the day, you will understand what you actually spent your time on and what you could not do from these tasks just to fulfill the plan.
• Done - a list of all completed tasks. At the beginning or at the end of the day, I transfer them from “Made Today” to “Finish”. In fact, this is a trashcan 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 time bound, and I don’t want to forget about them during the week so as not to schedule something else for this time. I have always had a difficult time with the calendar, so I added a few boards with the names “Cases for Monday”, “Cases for Tuesday”, etc., into which I began to add cases tied at the time.



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

Why not a calendar? For me, it's terribly difficult to use two utilities at the same time. If I use a calendar for this, I will need to enter it, fill it in, and regularly enter it to check if I have forgotten something ...

At this moment I approached the borders of Trello. The main problem was that more than 50 tasks were recorded per day, and there was a satisfied large pool of cases tied to both the general list and the lists tied to the days. How to understand that the task that I need to do, I have already recorded? Began to appear doubles. How to simultaneously prioritize all tasks for one of the projects? How to give other people the opportunity to see your schedules?

I needed a system that, while maintaining relative ease:

1. Could group tasks by projects.
2. To have a calendar reference (execute tomorrow), and automatically transfer it to tasks for today, with the onset of the day.
3. Would integrate with the Google-calendar.

Here I returned 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 to Inbox, which I try to immediately parse. By parsing is meant:

• Determining the date when the task will be completed (for short tasks I, most often, put 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 for the project).

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

Calendar integration
ToDoist integrates perfectly with the Google-calendar, and in both directions. I share the calendar with my colleagues so that they can see when it’s impossible to get through to me.



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

Handling non-operational inbound tasks

I forcibly do not rush to do tasks right away, except for those tasks where the fire is obvious. “We urgently need to contact the management of ABC, because the server is lying and there is no response from its employees” - obviously the 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 become the task of Say X, that we can talk then and the task Talk with X about Y, which is already tied to time. Almost any incoming task turns into “Plan ...” at the beginning.

Prioritization of tasks
All tasks included in the day do not complete. Watching myself, I understood the following (each number will have a different one, but the main thing is to come to conclusions).

1. I write about 50-70 tasks every day.
2. Comfortably for myself (without a feeling of total fatigue at the end of the day) I can do up to 30 tasks.
3. Having done up to 50 tasks, I get tired, but uncritically.
4. I can close 70 tasks, but after that I will hardly get out of the “workaholism stream”, I will hardly fall asleep and in general will be little social.

Based on this, I decide what to do today. In ToDoist, there is a prioritization of each task, so in the morning I choose the tasks that are critical for the task, and I do the rest based on the capabilities and desires. Every day I transfer about 40-20 tasks to the following: what is interesting is that at the same time, the tasks on the next day again become 60-70.

Keeping statistics

I really want to understand in general how much time it took today to work-related matters and to which ones. To do this, I use the RescueTime application, which is on the phone, on 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 used efficiently. Now, when I'm not tired, I'm on the way listening to audiobooks in order to at least somehow use these 40 minutes.

I do not aggregate the data yet, creating a kind of personal Data Lake; time will come - get to this.

Conclusion will not be

1. The life of a modern person is a large flow of incoming tasks. Reduce it will not succeed; one must learn to control this flow.
2. Most of the anxiety - from the unknown of the upcoming. If we understand what awaits us in the coming days, the alarm will be significantly less.
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 the tasks I had forgotten about before.
4. Doing tracking tracking is not an end in itself, but, if you will, a way of self-education. Things that used to be lazy or things that have never been reached by hands become much easier to do. Many people (and I among them) generally, in general, feel better when tasks are set from the outside world. Task-tracking is such a way to set tasks for yourself and learn how to live your desires.
5. Work is not an end in itself. The goal is to organize your work schedule so that you get predictable free time, when you can work with yourself, your families, your interests.

If you are interested in my ideas and thoughts on it and near-that-topic, then you can read the channel :-)