Start it now. Just start it.

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m all for choosing a time to do a certain job: I live by deadlines anyway but it’s sensible and productive to pick a time that you will begin. Take a moment to judge how long something will take and assess when you’ll have all you need to complete it, then set that as a start date.

That means you can ignore it until that date and I am really all for getting stuff out of your head until you need to do it.

Except.

It’s that word ‘assess’.

I offer that the best way to assess a job is to start it. I’ve had times when I’ve had a last email with details of a job and as I’ve already known and confirmed the dates, I’ve only skimmed that message. Invariably, that’s been a mistake. Sometimes reading it over isn’t enough either.

Once or twice now I’ve done all the practical things yet as I came to start the work, realised I needed something more. Something that wasn’t apparent until I’d begun.

So I suggest you begin a job even if you’re going to then slot it into a date or a time later on. This lets you really understand what you need. It’s like checking you’ve got all the parts when you’re assembling furniture. You don’t do that and so far it’s worked out okay but you know some day it’s going to bite you.

Start the work, assemble some of the bits.

And then email the person who’s commissioned you. Having made that tiny start, you’ll be able to find some detail you need to check. Or at least that it sounds reasonable and believable that you want to check it. So you email them about that and they get the message: you’re on the case already. That goes down very well.

And then they email you back with the answer and thanking them, taking that detail and adding it to the work plan, it means one of two things.

First, you’ve started now and sometimes the ending is so clearly in sight that you might as well just go ahead and finish. When you can do a task, do a task.

But second and more commonly, when you come to do the task later, you feel like you’re already well underway – because you are.

Write down your process for doing things

Posted by William Gallagher

Write it down now.

A very long time ago, I used to be a computer programmer and there was a culture that documenting what one did was a waste of time. A good coder just got on with it, a good coder didn’t need to leave namby-pamby notes in the code.

That reminds me of how my brother used to refuse to wear a seatbelt because he (believed) he was a great driver. It’s the same level of idiocy and it’s got the same shockingly, overwhelmingly stupid blind spot. If you were this great driver, if you were better than anyone else, that means everybody else is worse than you and they are all on the road heading your way.

Similarly, coders who didn’t believe anyone should document what they’re doing were bollixed when they had to update someone else’s spaghetti of a programme. Talk to me about elegance in coding, talk to me about the language of the very finest programmers, just talk to me about it all later ’cause I’ve got this mess to sort out now.

I’m minded of this for two reasons. The Evernote company blog just said it and said it thisaway:

Whether your business is a one-person shop or a multinational corporation, it’s very likely that you have a number of repetitive processes you go through on a regular basis. Some of these tasks could include preparing reports, submitting expenses, ordering office supplies, or responding to customers. Whether big or small, Evernote is the place to document your processes and maintain consistency.

Save Time by Documenting Processes – Joshua Zerkel, Evernote Blog (27 May 2014)

That’s not really a blog, it’s a sales brochure for Evernote and the full piece goes on to detail just how that software is good for this. But it does sound like it’s good for it, I am convinced.

But I’m really convinced because I helped a friend out with her website recently and it took me quite some time because the things she needed to do I had already done on my own site. I’d just forgotten how I did them.

I got it all working, I figured it out again – it was a WordPress installation, need I say more? – but I wasted a lot of time and actually while I got it working, I didn’t get it working quite the way I’d like. Not quite the way I have it on mine. I just could not find the specific plugins and settings I wanted for her and so I’d had to compromise.

So I’d compromised and it took a long time to get to the point of compromising. If I’d kept a note of what I’d done on mine, we’d have had hers running in a jiffy.

Much as I say about To Do tasks: if you have a complex thing that you do or even a simple thing that you have to do a lot, write down all the steps as if someone else is going to do them for you.

Free today – Lists To Do for iPhone

Posted by William Gallagher

I've not used it, not even heard of it before two minutes ago – but on being told of it, I wanted to make sure you knew too. This fairly basic-looking tasks app, Lists To Do, is free for today only.

It's usually 69p so it's not like that will destroy your bank balance, but To Do apps are so important that it's worth checking out a lot of them. And a lot of 69p can add up.

So do take a moment to check this one out here.

Should you write your To Do tasks as question?

Posted by William Gallagher

No.

So there.

Write your To Dos as if someone else is going to do them. Take the time to put that extra explanatory detail in there – so instead of writing “Phone meeting Anne” on your list, write “Phone Anne to ask her for purchase order number”. The second takes longer to write but you come to the phone tomorrow and you are dialling immediately. The former is shorter but tomorrow you’re going to look at “Phone meeting Anne” and think, what’s that about? Is she phoning me or am I supposed to phone her? And you may well have to stop to think: hang on, which Anne?

I believe this, I do this, it works. Not everyone agrees.

1# Change a relatively boring list to something that can excite you
Since lists in their current state are declarative in nature, I first tackled changing the way I write them.

I found out that we’re more likely to read something if it has a question mark attached to it which led me to change the way I write tasks.

Let’s start with one of the most boring tasks that I know off, doing your laundry.

Instead of writing it like the mundane task it is i.e. as a declaration “- Do the laundry at 8 PM”, write it as a question or even a challenge! This will rub some extra flavor into it “Can you finish the laundry before 8:30 PM?” and will make sure you’ll tackle it.

Asking question stimulates our curiosity; curiosity is an engine that motivates us to explore and discover.

Are We Managing Our To-Do Lists All Wrong? – IQ Tell

Haim Pekel wrote that on the IQ Tell productivity blog which I didn’t see and hadn’t heard of until Lifehacker spotted it yesterday. Lifehacker’s more pro this idea than I am, so do read the full piece on IQ Tell to see what you think.

Force your To Do app to have start dates

Posted by William Gallagher

Most To Do apps don’t have this but you need it and there’s a way to fake it on any software:

This is the ideal: you write one task and you give it both a start date – called “deferred until” in that screenshot – and a date that really have to do it by. All in one. (Actually, no, the ideal is to not use either start or end dates, especially not end dates. But that’s another story.)

There’s a good, solid, practical reason why this is the ideal when you have a deadline and there is a more nebulous yet enormously more important reason too. First, the practical one:

Having one task with start and end means you’ve one place to go change its details if you need

The nebulous one is:

Software that has start dates will keep your task hidden away from you until then.

It’s in your system, you won’t forget it, you just won’t have to consider it at all until the time you’ve said you should start.

Set it, forget it, get on with the stuff you have to do now.

I mean it when I say this is enormous. It’s the difference between a To Do list that you will use and one that just becomes this enormous long stupid hateful damn bloody list of a million things you still haven’t done yet, you total failure.

So it’s a shame that not every To Do app does start dates. My beloved OmniFocus does. (The screenshot above comes from OmniFocus for Mac where start dates are now called Defer Until dates. Apparently people got confused. But start dates are so crucial that the term is now burnt into me.) Other apps have it too: the online one Asana, the iPhone one Appigo To Do. It’s hard to give you a definitive list of what does and doesn’t have it because it changes a lot – and because some software firms look like they’ve only added start dates because customers wouldn’t stop shut up about them. The feature is there but, my lights, it’s hard to find.

You’d think you could just google like “omnifocus start date app review” or somesuch and get the answer for any app, but you simply can’t. Do try it. If you’re considering a particular To Do app, definitely google whether it has start dates. Be prepared to dig through articles. If the app is free, just get the bleedin’ app and try looking in that. But look for it, hope to find it, be prepared that you may not.

And if you don’t, fake it.

Do this:

Give your task a deadline, a due date, that is really the day you should start it
Call that task something like “Do that thing which is due on 1st May”
Create another task called “Do that thing” and give it a due date of 1st May or whatever the the real deadline is

It’s two tasks instead of one. And you may see both on your list every day, but typically your app will at least put them at the bottom of the list until the first deadline appears.

It works. It’s not elegant. There’s a strong chance that it’ll go wrong: if you tick the first one, the starting task, when you begin it but you don’t finish on that day, you have to remember to continue it tomorrow.

Have you noticed that I’ve avoided saying oh, to hell with it, just buy OmniFocus?

Bugger.

Don’t give yourself a deadline

Posted by William Gallagher

You’ve got this thing to do, it’s important, you want to do it, you need to do it, of course you’re going to put it on your To Do list and of course you’re going to put a deadline.

Don’t.

Does it actually, really, seriously, honestly, have to be done by a certain date? If you’re delivering something to a client, yes. But that is about the only time you need a deadline. If you work at a place where, say, the holiday rota comes out on a particular day and you’ve got this many seconds to get your request in, fine.

Everything else you do, avoid setting a deadline.

Don’t have a start date, don’t have a deadline date, just have the task.

Because you are going to get it done. It is on your list. You’ll write the task as if someone else is going to do it, fine. It’ll help you to say that it’s a task to do with this project or that: I have tasks for an event I’m producing, for instance. I’ll say the task belongs in that event project. If you’re using OmniFocus, you have to set a certain amount of detail in order to get the task out of your general-purpose, catch-all task inbox. (See part 2 of What’s So Great About OmniFocus.)

That task will then stay out of your way until you go looking for it. Part of using a good, trusted To Do system is that you don’t have to constantly see all your tasks because you elect to review the lot at certain times. It’s a core concept of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

So it’s there, you don’t have to keep thinking about it, you will get it done.

If you added some artificial deadline, the task would pop up in your face on that date. But it’s an artificial deadline. A contrived one. Odds to onions, you’d see that notification and you would dismiss it. Why wouldn’t you? It isn’t a real deadline, you don’t actually have to do that now, swat it away.

Deadline notifications just became meaningless.

If you’re having to consciously stop and work out whether this deadline is the real deadline, you’re screwed.

I will spend time on my To Do tasks when I’m writing them in. Actually, no, I’ll often chuck half a thought in and then work it up into a proper task when I get home. But once that’s done, once it’s in the list, I don’t want to have to think about it until either I’m ready to do the task or it is time that I have to. Don’t make yourself have to work your list, deciding every day what’s real and what isn’t. Spend that time doing your To Dos.

Is it a task? Is it an event? No, it’s… er… um…

Posted by William Gallagher

I was in a meeting last night and was told I had to do something – but only if certain other things happened. Broadly, if any of these things go wrong then I have to do this or that or the other depending on what and where and when.

It all makes absolute sense but it makes sense to me now. I don’t know that it makes so much sense that I will remember it in a year’s time when one of these things goes wrong.

Plus, I got into a state recently because my OmniFocus To Do list was so full of stray ideas and stuff that I will never get around to that I wasn’t getting around to the stuff I needed to do. I was seeing trees instead of wood. I was feeling like I’d lost all control of everything. And while I’m back now, while it feels great to be on top of it all once more, the road to that misery is to bung in things that you shouldn’t.

And I don’t know. I can’t put this particular instruction in my calendar, that’s obvious. But I can put it in my task list. Yet if I do, when exactly do I tick it off? Possibly never, certainly not for a month, probably not for many months. It would sit there forever, really.

This is starting to happen more and more. I don’t know how I’ve coped with it before, I’m not sure that I have coped with it before, but it’s happening now and I need to deal with it now. So what I’m trying is this: I’m creating Evernote notebooks devoted to the organisation or the project. Those instructions are now one note that will stay in Evernote forever. Because that’s what you use Evernote for: it’s for remembering forever. And if I never look up the notebook again, it’ll be because I don’t need to. Fine.

But will this work? It sounds sensible to me. Except in a month or a few months or a year or if ever this thing goes wrong, then will I remember that I have these Evernote notebooks?

I should add a task to OmniFocus that says “Check the Evernote notebooks you created in order to not have tasks in OmniFocus that you need to check”