post-it notes

Start and finish with one system

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I don’t care what it is: you need one place and solely one place to write down what you have to do. It doesn’t matter if that’s pen and paper, it doesn’t matter if it’s a full-on OmniFocus To Do app that’s synced across every computer, tablet and phone you own.

Well, there are limits.

If you’re driving behind a very dirty van, scrawling To Do: Clean Me isn’t ideal.

If you’re currently using Post-It notes or you’re strangely drawn to them, stop now. Post-It notes are not your friend. They’re certainly not mine as I’m papyrophobic – I’m a writer afraid of paper – but they’re also definitely not yours because they are like a party you’re not invited to.

The clue is in the name: Post-It Notes. Plural. Nobody ever had one Post-It note with their To Do list on, they have had many, many such notes since the dawn of time or when such notes were invented, whichever came later.

And you need one.

Just one.

It might have to be pretty big: a paper spiral-bound notebook rather than a single sheet. I do definitely recommend computers for about a hundred thousand reasons.

But what’s mandatory is that you have one place.

One place that you write down everything you’ve got to do: it must be one place, without exception, and it must be everything, without fail. You need one system: when you have a task to do, you write it in this one place, then you do the task, then you mark in this one place that you’ve done it.

I say this to you and I start twitching about roughly a hundred thousand things that tell me I’m right to rely on OmniFocus. But if you’re just starting out getting your head clear and if you’ve fallen off this productivity wagon, I know that the first thing to do is to have one place, one system.

How do you know when you’re finished if you have more than one place to check?

Turn your To Do tasks into an art project

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There are principles here that I like very much but it’s also heavily paper- and sticker-based and I just can’t handle Post-It Notes and colouring in. So I won’t be following Kelly Maguire’s exact advice but it’s terribly interesting how she turned her life around with a felt-tip pen:

For the past few months I’ve been waking up in a cold sweat freaking out about things I forgot to take care of. A lot of it is little — like forgetting to schedule a hair appointment until after they’ve closed for the day. Some of it is bigger — like the Kickstarter I did a few years ago that fizzled out. And a few things are huge — like the fact that I completely bungled my corporate tax filings for the last three years.

With some nudging from my therapist and support from my husband, I finally managed to get on top of things. My to-do list has gone from “deal with three years of back taxes” to more mundane stuff like “clean up the dried paint in the bathroom.” I used a handful of different strategies to gain control, which I’ll detail in a sec, but the biggest key to staying motivated has been to turn it into something like an art project.

Time management as an art project – Kelly Maguire, Offbeat Home (1 January 2015)

One thing she uses is called a Chronodex and you’ll see why she likes it plus she tells you where to get them for yourself, but that’s not a Chronodex…

…that’s Moonbase Alpha.


Read the full piece.