I’m a big fan of Merlin Mann’s geeky personal productivity web site, 43 Folders. His “Inbox Zero” series, in particular helped me get (almost totally) on top of my email, a problem that’s plagued me ever since I’ve had an email account. (Granted, the root cause of this is my own lack of organization, combined with chronic procrastination, but I’m not quite ready for that level of analysis.)
One of the biggest problems I’ve had is keeping to-do lists. For years I just used the notepad in the back of my Day Runner planners, and that worked fine. Then Yahoo! Calendar (and now Google Calendar) supplanted my Day Runner, and I generally stopped carrying around notebooks. The to-do lists I made on Yahoo! never seemed to go anywhere, because of the general slowness of doing such things pre-Ajax.
While on tour with the Baptist Generals a few years ago, Jason Reimer introduced me to the Moleskine notebook, and ever since, it’s been my main point of idea capture and to-do lists. (I use their bigger Cahier notebooks for recording session notes.) Still, while my online calendar kept me on track for meetings, sessions, and general planning, the afore-mentioned lack of organization and chronic procrastination meant that I was still slacking on crossing of to-do’s. Mastering projects would sit in on my desk for weeks, waiting for my psyche to finally kick my ass into gear. It sucked!
What I’ve come to realize is that the calendar, in my mind, is inflexible. There’s usually a person involved is that appointment, someone to keep my lazy ass in check. If I don’t feel like having band practice, too fucking bad — Gcal just paged me, I have 30 minutes to get over there. I’ve also realized that a lot of these to-do’s sitting around for weeks in my Moleskine take more than just a few minutes to accomplish, which is why they sit around. I need to make time — specific time — to take care of this shit.
So I took all of those to-do’s, figured out basically how long each would take, and scheduled them in my calendar. Now my Google Calendar is bursting with all of these things I used to let sit in my notebook. I even scheduled 30 minutes every Monday to tear through the to-do list in my notebook. This is basic project management stuff, but it’s done in a way that integrates nicely with the rest of my life. I feel better already.
Why am I on here? I was intrigued by the ‘bullshit’.
Glad, too, cause I am totally going to take your advice and do this calendar thing. Someone needs to get my ass in time management/project management shape, and this just might be the thing!