I have been in search of the perfect organization application. One that lets me captures all my notes and helps me manage my time efficiently. For years I have felt like I have been able to accomplish enough on a day to day basis. There is no merit for this statement outside of my own, my peers speak of me in high regards, and my company recognizes my hard work. But there is something inside of me telling me I am doing things wrong, I can be better.
At the time I had been reading a few blogs that had made references to a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. It described in detail a system for exactly what the title stated, getting things done. It seemed simple enough, collect, process, organize, review, and do.
Being involved in the software industry, I immediately started thinking about tools. Someone must have implemented a GTD solution or even a task management application. Google provided an enormous list, ranging from command line applications, Desktop applications, and web based applications. If I were going to commit to a digital system, accessibility was a necessity, so I started with web applications. A few of them were Tasks, TadaList, and Remember the Milk.
Over time I started noticing that my task list was continually growing, I had trouble finding particular items, and I started to nitpick the tool. I told myself, I’m not effective because Tadalist doesn’t categorize my lists properly, it does remind me when something is due. So what did I do, I thought I could write my own application. What better tool than one built by and catered to me?
I was looking for an excuse to pick up Ruby, and at the time, the new Ruby on Rails framework (it felt like 90% of the applications back then were to-do lists). The result was what I thought exactly what I needed; I could capture tasks, tag them, search for them, add due dates, and even make assignments to my coworkers.
After spending a few more weeks with the application, I was in the same boat again, a list of tasks, not executing fast enough. What was I doing wrong? Somehow I had missed the elephant in the room when reading GTD, I expected tools to do all the work for me when it was me who had to change. I decided that before I can criticize the tool, I need to do what I normally do with any project at work, figure out my requirements and use cases. I shutdown my application and grabbed my Moleskine notebook and a pen.
What needed to be done was a some self introspection. How am I working throughout the day? Where is my time going? I started with two pages. I dedicated a few pages to capture tasks for the week. Then there was a page that I created every day, my calendar. I started with a vertical line on the left side of a page. Adding in a few tick marks to designate my work hours and I was pretty much done. Now all I had to do was fill it in; any meetings would be designated by a hatch filled box, work that I did outside of meetings was a unfilled box. Using 30 minute increments, as I worked I filled in comments to track what I have been doing.
At the end of the day I could see what I actually did. Where did I spend my time, where do I need to adjust, and why certain things did not get done. Let’s face it, things happen, you have to adjust, but you need to be aware of the adjustments and how they impact your other work.
At the end of every week, I would copy the tasks I had not completed into a new set of pages. Now this is somewhat a waste of a few pages, but it forced me to refresh my mind on every open task as well as motivate me to complete something low hanging fruit out so I wouldn’t need to copy it again. A digital tool here would have made it too easy for me to forget.
This simple little process has helped me gain this perspective and has resulted in a system that does not require a digital tool, which is great, I can capture and track my work in any environment now.
The lessons I learned:
- Keep the tools simple, don’t get caught up in building the perfect tool.
- Writing things down relieved me of stress.
- Capture what I’m doing and how long it takes me to do it. In general it improves my ability to estimate when I can complete something.
- Inch forward, there is no need to finish everything today, there is only a need to finish a few important things.