Over the weekend, my husband and I were discussing our current to-do list systems. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I've been making use of Google calendar to plan out my weeks. One of the features I like is that I can put in a bigger task as an "event" and block out a certain amount of time for it. I also block out time for ongoing tasks like personal care, lunch, making dinner, etc. That helps me better grasp how much time I actually have in a day and avoid trying to do too much, getting overwhelmed, checking out mentally, and feeling like a failure.
My husband thinks using Google calendar as a task planner is "too complicated." He wants me to write all my to-do items on a "master list " (quotes for skepticism) we have in a notebook. This is a system he came up with where everything gets written together--projects, maintenance items, next steps--and he uses various symbols to designate which is which. He also has symbols that mean "easy or quick task," "made progress on this," "urgent," and of course a checkmark for "complete."
I resist using this list because its nature leads to it being long and therefore overwhelming for me. I think if I wrote everything on it that I need to remember to do later, it would become very, very long. It seems that I notice or generate a lot of small project and maintenance tasks that are fairly easy to knock out. (An example, I want to put new glazing putty in the final two windows of our house, but I'm almost out. I've got a post on social media to ask if anyone has a partial container, but if not, I've got a product to buy online. I'm not writing this down anywhere. I'm "tracking" it by keeping the tab open that shows the purchase page for the putty. I scan my tabs daily, so I'm constantly reminded that's an open loop. Once I give my social media post a couple of days to be seen, I can go ahead with the purchase.)
If I wrote everything on one list, it could be adding five tasks and marking off three one day, adding four and marking off four the next day, adding seven and marking off five the next...you can see how you'd end up with lots of checked-off rows among not-checked-off rows, making it harder to scan, and creating even more of the "long overwhelming list" optic.
But I'm not saying my Google calendar is a whole system. It is good for scheduling future tasks, time blocking, and sending me notifications when my events are supposed to happen, but it's not good for keeping track of projects or small tasks that aren't "this week" urgent but shouldn't be forgotten.
I've read the book "Getting Things Done" by David Allen and listened to a number of their podcasts. My husband also likes the system described in the book. But the thing I notice is that the GTD system can be quite complicated. David Allen himself talks about having a number of separate lists--the Someday/Maybe list, the projects list, the "at computer" list, the "phone call/text" list, the "waiting for" list, the "discuss with wife" list, and so on. The only time he advocates writing everything in a single list is the brain dump, just to get everything on your mind down on paper (or on screen.) But then he says to clarify what each item is and sort it among the lists. Then you review all the lists weekly, but on a day-to-day basis, you just refer to the ones that are relevant to your situation (e.g. the "discuss with wife" list only needs to be looked at when he is talking with his wife and has time to bring things up.)
I have talked with my husband about breaking up our master to-do list more, at the very least separating out projects and maintenance activities onto their own lists (and just put the next step in a project on the master list.) A long list that is only clear, bite-size action steps would be much less overwhelming than what we currently have. He has said that's fine, but I have hesitated to do it because I'm afraid he will think it's too complicated of a system and not use it. You might say "only one way to find out," but I dislike the idea of wasted effort. Maybe I need to think of it as making a better system for myself and not worry so much about whether he gets on board with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment