Last week I tried different techniques to declutter my to-do list. There were too many tasks piled up and I was not even interested in even looking at it because of the huge amount of tasks in it. I tried different techniques and this is what worked for me. So in this week’s newsletter I’ll share with you my way of organizing my to-do list to do the things that actually matter.
So basically, the idea is to get the top level view of my life. For me there are 4 categories that I have to deal with every day.
Life at a glance - my personal agenda
Self learning - the courses I do (self learning)
Academics - university coursework
Work - the projects I do
Inbox - to include the tasks that I cannot put into any category above
Then I divide these into other categories. Let’s see how.
I have divided my day to day tasks to 4 sections
Everyday - the things I do everyday (example - Writing the journal)
Every week - the things I do weekly (example - writing the journal)
Every month - the things I do monthly (example - a monthly review)
Someday - the things that I think that I might do someday (example - learn to play violin)
Now I can keep track of the things perfectly.
For the other categories like work, it can be divided into sections like follows,
Backlog - all the projects that you got
Started - the projects you are working on
In Review - the projects that are in review
Finished - the projects that you finished
Now we know the system, how can we efficiently use this. For this we are gonna use Todoist - a task management app. The free version of the app is enough for us to do all these things. Download the app from https://todoist.com/home. Create an account and then open the app.
In the side panel you can see the Inbox that we talked about in the first place where all uncategorized tasks go.
Go there and click + Add Task to create your task. You can set the deadline and priority too. Priority means the importance of that task right now. For example if you have to submit a report today, that will be a high priority task.
Now let’s create our categories. For this you can click on Add project and add your categories. You have 5 free projects that you can create in the free version.
Now let’s divide the Life at Glance Category to the sections that I mentioned before. Go to the Category. You’ll see a screen as follows.
Click Add Section and add the sections that you want.
Mine looks like the above.
Do this to all the categories. Now we can see the tasks scheduled for today at the Today in sidebar.
Also you can see the upcoming tasks at Upcoming in the sidebar.
Now you have created a basic system and you have to experiment with different features in the app to find your perfect balance. You can do this in a book too. I prefer this as I can take any task on the way.
This week I started reading “Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day; Book by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky”. I’m still reading it and I have to say this is like the best productivity book I have read so far. The thing is that although we have these to of tasks, it’s often hard to decide what to work on, how to work on them, how to take control and many more. This book suggests 80+ tactics to make the best use of our time. If you have time I invite you to read it. Read it from here (https://amzn.to/3LOhpJP)
I used notion for years as my note taking app. Then I shifted to Obsidian few months ago but didn’t felt it. Now I started using Capacities and still experimenting with it. Let’s see.
🔗 Links
Make Time Book ( Audiobook, physical book, Kindle version) - https://amzn.to/3LOhpJP
Have a nice week,
Rusiru
Great !