How to Turbocharge Your To-Do List
People who have their act together don’t get easily distracted by trivial things. Yet, even they sometimes struggle to focus. The primary reason they lose focus is the overwhelming thought of all the work they’re not doing.
The world around us is constantly changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, often making you feel like you’re losing control of your work. Instinctively, you decide to make a to-do list. Aha! You feel better and get a few things done. Fast forward a few days, and you notice your to-do list crumbling under the onslaught of new tasks.
Don’t blame your to-do list if this is happening to you. Instead, turbocharge your to-do list. Here’s how:
- Centralize Your Master To-Do List: Use one place to make your master to-do list—whether it’s a notebook, a spreadsheet, or an app, stick to just one. You can temporarily collect tasks elsewhere, but as soon as possible, transfer them to your master list. Don’t worry if it grows into a monster; just ensure it’s always up to date.
- Weekly Review and Focus: Scan your master to-do list every weekend. Pull out what’s relevant for the coming week and create a weekly to-do list. Focus only on that weekly list during the week.
- Daily Review and Execution: Each day, review your weekly to-do list and create a day-specific to-do list. Focus on completing just that small list each day.
- Incorporate New Tasks: Any new tasks that come up should go into your master to-do list. Add them to your current week’s list if they are relevant for that week.
By following this system, when you work on a task, you know it’s the best use of your time at that moment. The other tasks are safely listed and won’t be missed or fall through the cracks. This confidence keeps your mind calm, allowing you to focus on the work at hand.
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(featured image: Photo by vikram sundaramoorthy from Pexels)
How to Quickly Create Your Meetings Requests in Google Calendar
Most meetings end, agreeing unanimously at least on one point and that is when to meet next! Phew, we have another meeting! And then more meetings!!
Meetings are an essential part of our work and sending meeting requests an essential chore. Most often sending meeting requests is a thankless job but it has the potential of creating chaos and confusion if not done correctly. If sending meeting requests is one of your activities, you should organize yourself so well that drafting and sending a meeting request should not take more than two minutes.
Let’s see two ideas with which Google Calendar (if that is what you use) can help you to clock that super-speed on a computer.
- Side panel of Gmail App – If you haven’t noticed, on the bottom right of the Gmail page you have the option to show the side panel. The side panel gives quick access to many other Apps and one of them is Google Calendar. All the GUI is very efficiently packed in that sidebar to get your work done fast. It also makes a lot of sense to create a meeting request just by side of your emails as you could refer them for the required information.
One neat trick Google Calendar does is to use the subject of the open email as the subject of the meeting being scheduled and you would be surprised to see how often that choice is better than what you had in your mind!
- Meeting Request Template – You may create meeting requests with the same content but for different people and at different times. You may like to have a sort of meeting request template to do this quickly.
Google Calendar being a web app opens a nice opportunity to do it. Create the meeting request of repetitive nature with all the details. While the meeting request is open, click on the hamburger menu and select “publish event”. On the Publish event GUI, copy the “link to the event” and paste it in the browser address bar and test it out. Finally, bookmark the URL on the bookmarks bar or in a suitable folder, for future use. Name the bookmark suitably. (Learn more about browser bookmarks here and here).
Next time, when you require to create a meeting request of that kind simply click on that bookmark and you will have the draft of the meeting request ready with the most laborious part taken care of.
Happy (perpetual) meeting season to you!
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My GTD Story
After completing my post-graduation in Remote Sensing – a space Technology, at IIT, I joined the dream job of Scientist in the Department of Space, Government of India. Besides doing the research activity, I wrote the required software code myself instead of looking for software developers. This idea of wearing two hats worked so well for our team – I mean, who doesn’t like all-rounders! It was a great brand to be known for.
So, eventually, when I moved to jobs at multinational corporations as a software developer, I went on adding more hats for myself, a manager, a software architect, a business executive, etc. More and more projects came my way. The top-rated year-end appraisals were proof of my success with my brand.
As my portfolio kept increasing, a period came in my career, when I was highly successful and highly stressed, at the same time. Why not, as I was doing the seemingly impossible task of folding, as per Paul Graham’s terms, Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule together into one. I could have not disappointed the stakeholders around me, as I had never let them down. I was also in no mood to dilute my brand. This struggle resulted in long working hours, stress, and work-life balance issues.
Added to this, I had a totally insensitive supervisor, who appeared waiting to see me fail. Despite the fact that I worked for him for the previous eight years did not matter anything to him. He deliberately chose to undermine my dedication to the work and focus on things that slipped through the cracks, which I agree had become common because of the massive workload and crazy schedules. He never missed an opportunity to show faults in my work. He called my directs to the meetings along with me and then humiliated me in front of them.
I could have simply left the job, but something inside me said that this would be running away from the problem than taking it head-on. On one hand, I reported the atrocities to the higher-ups but also decided to do something to eliminate my misses and inefficiencies.
One thing that was clear to me was that I had to work on was avoiding things falling through the cracks. I had noticed that my supervisor was good at remembering all the things that were under work. I could not do that so that well. I bought a bunch of books on personal productivity and also on how to remember things better. These books talked about some ideas but did not appear that they would solve my problem.
And then the life-turning moment came for me. I was chatting with my younger brother, who also is a software professional. When he knew that I was looking for a book on personal productivity, he suggested trying GTD (Getting Things Done) book by David Allen. I went through the book a couple of times and voila! I noticed that the GTD methodology hits at the root cause of the personal productivity problem. It is not that you have to increase your memory, but build a system that assists your naturally poor short-term memory.
The rest is history. I was always quite convinced about being organized and always experimented with it. This orientation helped me to not just quickly learn the GTD methodology, but bring innovations into it. In a year or so, I built the most promising personal productivity system for myself. It simply revolutionized my life. I felt fully in control of my responsibilities. Things stopped falling through the cracks. I planned my work more regularly and started working on them much in advance and completed them in time and with good quality. This helped not just me but my entire team working with me. As much as my supervisor shied away from appreciating this transition, but in the town hall meeting, he couldn’t avoid giving credit for several achievements of our department in that year to me.
As GTD got deeply wired into my way to work, it became my passion to continuously fine-tune my system and enjoy the compounding benefits. As a natural progression, I decided to share my success with my system with others, and since then wore just another hat – Personal Productivity Coach and Consultant!
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When Did You Change Your Toothbrush Last?
In all sincerity, we want to obey our dentist and change our toothbrush every three months, but very soon we lose track. The brush does not show any signs of wear, so we just go on with it till when we finally change and then get reminded about how a true brush actually feels!
There are several such activities that we want to do at certain intervals, like, you may wish to post on LinkedIn every seven days. And then there is a haircut, checking the air pressure in car tires, networking, and so on…
What is special about these activities is that they don’t fall on a certain day of the week or day of the month and the periodicity is longer. That makes them very forgettable!
A well-maintained Day Timer system can help you to stay on top of these. Timers are not new. You see them in the kitchen; you use them in the Pomodoro technique. A thriller show worth its salt will always have a timer scene (and potboilers will additionally have green wire/red wire clipping scene). But what we need here is a timer that counts days and not minutes. Here is my idea for such a timer system:
- Use one of the existing workbooks that you use every day and add a worksheet for timers.
- Set all the timers that you need, with one activity in a row. You need columns for name, frequency, the date when the activity was done last, and the difference in the number of days between today’s date and the day of the last activity.
- Conditionally format the difference column, so that it fills the cell with, say, amber color when the difference is greater than the frequency.
- The timer will go off when it crosses the frequency set by you and the cell will turn amber. You know then that you have an action.
- Once you do that activity, reset the date and the timer will start counting again from the start.
- The timer will continue showing you the number of days elapsed, even after it has gone off or is yet to go off, so you always have that information to look up.
- Set a ritual of looking at your timers every day – possibly as one of your morning rituals.
- Keep tweaking the frequency of the timer to make it more suitable to you based on your experince.
Do you want a ready-made template? Send a quick mail to me with Timer in the subject and I will send it to you.
That’s all to it! Get creative and have pride in staying consistent with all those practices that you care about!
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How could browser history ease your time card logging
Chrome browser supports extensions and there is a whole marketplace of Chrome extensions, both free and paid. The extensions extend out-of-the-box capabilities of the Chrome browser.
Do you use Chrome browser extensions? (What are your favorites? Please write to me.)
I need a bunch of them for my day job of software development – read screen coordinates, color picker, smart Auto-refresh, etc. But there are other extensions that are useful in general for productivity. Instapaper is a very important extension for me. Grammarly extension provides nice support during writing. The one that I am going to talk more about is browser history extensions.
Chrome browser, out of the box, provides very basic functionality related to managing browsing history. Thus, it is natural that there are a few extensions available to fill that gap. Primarily these extensions provide the following features:
- Capability to search in your browsing history
- Go to a specific date (and even time) and check out the details of browsing.
- Delete some clutter if you want to (you may need it once in a while if not routinely).
Here are some interesting ways in which we can use the browser history function:
- If you want to locate some interesting page that you had visited once but missed to bookmark it. You could search by keywords to find it. Or if you know the date, you could go and easily locate it.
- If you are in habit of writing a journal, you can use the history to fill the missing pieces in your journal.
- Since anyway we spend most of our time in the browser, it creates a nice log of our daily work. Each history entry goes with a specific time. Thus, one could use it as a time logger. This time log will be of great help whenever you want to study where your time goes and to replan your work schedule.
It’s also interesting to watch the wide gaps in history to see if they are there for valid reasons. It cannot be called a precise logger, but the beauty is that it is automatic.
As of writing, the best extension is Better history https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better-history/egehpkpgpgooebopjihjmnpejnjafefi This extension has all the above capabilities and has a pleasing graphics user interface.
Install the history extension and use it for its productivity benefits!
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Sign off for the day like a Pro
Have you been in a jewelry shop at the time of their closing for the day? It’s quite dramatic. There is a sudden spurt of activity and in that hustle, all the valuables from the displays, get checked, packed, and moved to the vault (I guess), and soon the place that oozed opulence looks dreary! They have a well-coordinated closing ritual.
Most of us also have some sort of closing ritual that we do when we close for the day, but if it is thoughtfully planned and regularly done, it can provide invaluable benefits.
The first step is to write down the actions that you would like to do at the end of every day. You are doomed if you thought you would remember! You might want to write that at a place that is easily accessible – a spreadsheet on your computer or a listing app on your mobile. What you write in it is very specific to you but here are few ideas:
- Fill in the timecard, if you are into this.
- Update the journal (you should maintain one) where you record whatever was done on a day. You may want to reflect on how the day went and note down any new ideas as they occur to you in your to-do list.
- Look at the next day’s calendar.
- Look at the “Drafts” folder for any mail that was mistakenly remained unsent.
- Update your networking document with any new connections that you made
- Check if your backup service is running all right.
- Shut down a computer.
Start with a set of actions and keep tuning it as per your needs. We then need to stop our work a few minutes before, to do these closing actions.
I had earlier written a post about having a morning ritual and if you have one, here is an interesting idea – During the morning ritual, you may want to create day-specific closing actions, if any. This will give you a fail-safe mechanism to not miss some important action in the chaos of the day!
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