Two weeks ago I realized that I was falling behind in life...and I mean rapidly!!Between my job driving me nuts, taxes, 529 plans, relocating internationally, a house hunting trip coming this week, getting our house on the market (this Friday), cleaning house (my fav), finances (like paying that pile of bills staring at me), getting my truck ready to sell (might have to actually fix that coolant leak after all) and just generally trying to keep up with the kiddos............I was getting B-E-H-I-N-D!!!
So, I took a deep breath and spent a few hours cleaning my work office, my home office and consolidating all of those yellow stickies lying around - reminding me of the things still needing to get done. Jen even pitched in and sent me about a dozen reminders (a.k.a., "tasks") in outlook so they slid into the fold seamlessly...that was nice of you dear ;-)
The result...an absolute miracle! The clean spaces around me actually make me feel better and the list has proven an invaluable tool in improving my efficiency. I have been looking at it religiously throughout each day. I have found many times that I actually CAN make use of those occasional 15 min breaks in the action and get a little task completed (like calling the newspaper to cancel...something I have forgotten to do for ~2 months). I now find myself with more energy, the ability to stay up a little later and getting a lot more done. I know that this is old news for many of you...but it was a much needed "find" on my part...I can't imagine my life right now without my list!
And lucky for you...it got me to the point where I still have a few minutes every night to post!
9 comments:
Ah yes ... a convert to the GTD philosophy! "GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks." Definition courtesy of Wikipedia. Now ... who has a suggestion for the best way to develop such lists online? I personally like to keep such lists online because I find myself at different computers in different homes frequently these days!!! And we do appreciate the time you now have gained in your day to post to your blog, Rob! Hoping you can keep it up in CR!!!
I am currently trying the free service "Remember the milk". It integrates with your google calendar, works with mobile devices, you can share tasks, email lists and also supports desktop widgets. Oh yeah, and its free. I will write something up once I get a little further into testing...
I forgot to mention...I actually use Netvibes as a one page manager for my feeds, gmail, weather and "remember the milk" tasks. It also is free and it is pretty slick.
you're moving internationally?
very exciting.
will you still be able to blog?
I've found that I live religiously by my lists otherwise everything would be half a$$ed on my part.
:)
Yahoo calendar also supports to-do lists. It's integrated with yahoo mail - just click the "calendar" tab at the top of the page. Or go to http://calendar.yahoo.com directly. It also does all that syncing crap, in case you were an idiot and bought a PDA thinking it would be useful.
Clean desk not equal clean life, cowboy.
Rhonda, I am not only able to blog from Costa Rica but it is an expectation from our family back in the states!
Cherk, have you ever owned a PDA?
BBgun, true true. Fortunately for me all I needed to clean up was my desk to have a clean life ;-)
As a matter of fact, I owned a PDA for quite some time. It was a Dell Axiom that I got for free for winning the "best panel discussion" prize at The Company annual technical conference. I really, really tried to like it, but I found that I spent more than 90% of my time with it trying to figure out synchronization issues and worrying if the battery was going to discharge, since it stored all applications in volatile memory that erased itself if your primary, rechargeable battery lost power (~8 hours) and your secondary non-rechargeable battery also died (about 24 hours of total battery life).
I ended up hating it so much that I actually just threw it in the garbage when I moved to Fort TomCollins.
Sounds about right...I had a palm pilot which had tons of sync issues as well...I finally pitched that one too.
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