Today I came up with a new method of organizing my to-do list.
I struggle all the time with optimizing the to-do list process. A perfect to-do list should be easy to write in a flash without putting too much thought into it, and streamlined to all you to work efficiently and effectively. Ironically, coming up with a good to-do list process involves a lot of the opposite of both of those things.
Sometimes I advocate using a task card system rather than a to-do list. This is where you have a stack of notecards, each with a task written on it. There is no hierarchy or order to them. You do the first thing on the stack, and if it’s not convenient or impossible to do right now, you put it on the bottom of the stack and do the next card. This is helpful because it keeps you from getting overwhelmed with a long list of chores. All you see at any time is just one thing.
Unfortunately, it’s not always convenient to carry around a stack of index cards, and there’s no electronic version of this method that I’m aware of. (If you’re an app developer, call me.)
So when I’m at work I’ve been using a spreadsheet to keep track of my tasks for the day/week. What I’ll do is list the things I want to get done in column B, and then in column A I’ll go through and assign each one a number, starting with 1 (for the most urgent task). Then I’ll just sort the data numerically, and—BAM—I’ve got a to-do list sorted by urgency that I can follow along all day.
At least, that’s how I’d been doing it until today.
The biggest difficulty with this method is when you’ve got a list of 10 different tasks, it’s easy to know which one should be first but it’s sometimes hard to know what’s going to be 5th or 7th or whatever. I’d start numbering things and then realize I meant to put something else higher in priority, and then I have to go back and renumber everything that came after it. Same problem if a new task comes up that I need to slot in somewhere in the middle of the day. Basically, it’s not very forgiving of adjustments and mistakes.
But today I hit on a new method that seems to fix that problem. Why stick to a rigid numbering system? If I have 10 to-do items, who says they have to be number exactly 1 through 10? Instead, I’ll number the items based on a rough estimate of how urgent they are (which is much, much easier to guess than specifically what they’ll come before or after). Urgent tasks all get numbered “1.” Stuff that can wait until after the urgent items gets numbered “5” (not 2 as you might expect). I continue like that, increasing each level by 5. Stuff that doesn’t need to get done anytime soon but just needs to be there as a reminder gets numbered “99” just to keep it out of the way.
Then when I sort the data, I’ve got stuff in roughly the order I need to do it in. Next I can go through all the #1s, for example, and renumber them 1-4. (If there’s more than 4 ugent items, I might have to implement using decimals or something. That issue hasn’t come up yet. Frankly, most of the “urgent” things I have to do in a day can be done in any order as long as they’re all given priority over other things, so it’s not even necessary to worry about numbering them individually.) I can do the same for the items marked “5”, etc.
So this is my new system for organizing my to-do list at work. Even writing this post was on the to-do list, after getting all my higher-priority work-related tasks done first. It’s a system that seems like it will suit me just fine, at least until I can develop my task-card app. (Seriously, if you know someone who makes apps, send them my way.)
The Vulcan Buddha 