August 23rd, 2007
True to my promise, this post is all about trying to get more done.
We’re all busy. Unfortunately, being busy does not always lead to accomplishment. For me, and I’m sure for a lot of ADHD folks, I can be busy all damned day and get zilch done.
I’ve tried lots of list strategies and list management software… I think I was the first one in my town with a Day Planner, and a couple of years after that, the ONLY one with a primitive PDA.
But the reality is is that with all these tools, I spent an inordinate amount of time managing lists!
So, effective immediately, I’m going to blend a couple of different tactics and see if I can make them stick.
One tactic I read about was on webworkerdaily.com. This article espouses a ‘Tiny To Do List’, and they bring up a lot of favorable reasons for doing so… easier to remember, easier to manage, easier to accomplish.
I’m going to integrate that with the ‘Seven Buckets’ philosophy. I saw this on Digg about a month or so ago. I tried to find the link for you, but the url has gone dead. I have the text of the article saved, but I can’t verify the author, so I won’t repost it. If you’d like it, email me.
Anyway, ‘Seven Buckets’ basically follows the old philosophy class analogy, where life is a bucket, and there are important things in life (’rocks’), but you never have enough room in your bucket because it’s chock full of less important but more demanding crap (’pebbles’,’sand’).
As a task management philosophy, however, it really makes sense to me. You have essentially seven buckets each week, one for each day. ‘Rocks’ are the big things you’d really like to get done, but never do, because every day is always filled up with sand and pebbles. Sand and pebbles are the equivalent of the every-day hot topics that come in and out all day; you can’t really control them, but they have to get done. So if you don’t have a plan, and deal with the sand and pebbles every day, those big ol’ rocks just keep piling up and going nowhere.
So if you combine the two, it might work like this.
Each week you come up with your ‘rocks’, ‘pebbles’ and ’sand’, with the expectation that this is, of course, infinitely malleable. We’ll use this as our ’someday’ list per the Tiny To Do List school of thought.
Each day, we’ll once again use the Tiny To Do List process and pick three things from the Someday list; one rock, one pebble, one sand.
Obviously there might have to be some forethought if a rock or pebble is predicated upon some sand somewhere, but you get the drift.
Once you have your rock-pebble-sand castle built for the day, you get on with getting on! If something on your Tiny To Do List doesn’t get done, it gets recycled into the ‘Someday’ list.
Some of you are probably saying, “Jon, how the hell is that different from the Tiny To Do List?”, and you’d have merit, to be sure. In my mind, it’s different enough to possibly be effective, if only for me. See, I don’t think you want to load a day with all ‘rocks’, ‘pebbles’, or ’sand’, but a nice harmony of the three might work out. Maybe it’s nothing more than taking the Tiny To Do List and adding a little Tiny Bit of Prioritization to it.
In any case, that’s what I’m going to try.
I use a nifty little list manager called ListPro in my iPaq from Illium Software. I’m going to try to do a template that incorporates these ideas, and I’ll post it here if anyone wants to check it out.
Now I have to get some stuff done….
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