Analog Task Management
Third in a series on task management. Read part 1 and part 2.
For many years my task management system has been all digital. Recently, though, I’ve taken to supplementing it with some analog tools.
Field Notes Day Planner
As I mentioned in my post on OmniFocus I have trouble picking out what to work on when my task list gets too long. I try to filter my task list in OmniFocus down to a manageable subset that I use to pick what to work on, but there’s a balance to be struck between getting the list down to a manageable number of choices and not cutting it down so much that things slip through the cracks.
To help deal with this I started coming up with a list of my important tasks for each day. Every day before I leave work I come up with my major task list for the following day. For both technical reasons1 and because I thought it might introduce a bit of deliberation into the process (and a physical limit on how many tasks I could write down for each day) I decided to go analog.
I use a little Field Notes notebook. Each day gets a pair of facing pages. The date goes at the top of the left-hand page and underneath it I write my major tasks for the day. Depending on how full my schedule is and how big I think the tasks are, there are usually 2-5 tasks. One of them is usually a deep work type task that I’ll work on in the morning.
Many of the major tasks are lifted right out of my task list in OmniFocus, but sometimes a major task for the day might represent a series of smaller actions from a project I want to make progress on.
As I go through the day I use bullet journal type markings to check off the tasks I get done and mark those that did not get done and got deferred to a future day.2
The other thing I’m trying out in this analog system is to schedule my time during the day. I’ve heard this advice many times, but it always seemed too restrictive until I read Cal Newport’s explanation of how he does it in Deep Work. This inspired me to give it a try.
On the right-hand page I write the hours of the day every other line, so each line represents 30 minutes. I copy over the “hard schedule” items from my calendar (meetings, appointments, etc.) in red ink. I block out the rest of my day in pencil. When I’m doing this I usually start with the stuff that’s pretty regular from day to day (hard schedule permitting) like doing email after lunch and planning out tomorrow’s schedule before I leave. With the remaining time (and some days there isn’t much of it) I block out time for the major tasks I wrote down on the left-hand page. Sometimes this prompts me to rethink how many of those major tasks I can actually get done in a given day.
Writing the items that aren’t part of my hard schedule in pencil is a deliberate choice. I’m generally a ballpoint pen guy when it comes to writing, but the schedule needs to be flexible because, inevitably, things will come up and it will have to change. Using pencil is both a philosophical declaration that this is subject to change and a practical choice so that I can make those changes without turning the page into a complete mess.
Listing my major tasks and planning out my schedule has been a boon for me so far. It requires an investment of time and effort up front, but I spend a lot less time staring at OmniFocus and trying to decide what to work on next and I’m less likely to get distracted by something if I’ve got a schedule that says what I’m supposed to be doing at that moment.
The Big Board
One of the issues with the way I practice Getting Things Done is that the very task oriented approach doesn’t always give the best high level overview of the project.3 It can take some effort to sort through my list of “next actions” for a project and translate that into where I am with the project as a whole.
I’ve had a whiteboard in my office since I started working at my current job, but rarely put it to any use. A few months ago I decided to see if I could use it to help me get a higher level understanding of where my many projects stood.
I printed out a list of all my projects in a nice big font and taped it up on the left side of the board. On the whiteboard itself I wrote in the next step for that project with the date for that step (if there is one) over on the right side. By “next step” I mean something at a higher level than the GTD-style “next action”. For instance, the next step for a project might be a meeting with the people involved, which would have a series of actions associated with it (do a Doodle poll to set a date for the meeting, reserve the room, set the agenda and send it out, etc.).
Being able to see where I am with all my projects at a glance is very useful. I’m responsible for quite a few projects and many of them are long term who’s deadlines are many months or years away. It’s important to make sure I keep making sufficient progress on these projects and don’t let all my time get sucked up with things that have short term deadlines. The whiteboard does a good job of helping me set priorities for what I need to be doing on these projects to make progress towards the long term goal.
It’s early days yet for both of these analog tools, but so far they seem to be useful additions to my task management system.
- OmniFocus only supports one level of flagging (either a task is flagged or it isn’t) and I was already using that functionality to create a 15-20 item subset of my larger tasks list that I draw from for my daily list of major tasks. ↩
- Tasks that are done get an “X” and those that don’t get done and are pushed to a future day get a “>”. ↩
- I should emphasize that this is largely a problem with the way I implement GTD. David Allen has some good stuff in his book on taking a higher level view of your projects (and your life) but that’s part of the system that I don’t really make enough use of. ↩