ASIAN EFFICIENCY
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ASIAN EFFICIENCY PRIMER
Published by Asian Efficiency Limited Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Version 2.0
Copyright © 2014 Asian Efficiency Limited
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under the Hong Kong Copyright Ordinance, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Asian Efficiency Limited at [email protected]. Neither this book, nor any of the contents of this book, are approved or endorsed by any companies or brands mentioned within.
It is not the purpose of this book to cover the full range of information that is otherwise available on this topic, but instead to complement, amplify and supplement other texts. You are urged to read all available material and tailor the information to your individual needs.
Every effort has been made to make this book as accurate as possible.
However, there may be mistakes, and with all the rapid changes online, some details may be inaccurate by the time you read this. Therefore, this text should be used only as a general guide and not as the ultimate source of information on the topic.
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TRADEMARKS
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners including the following:
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The terms Windows® and Outlook® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. For more information on Microsoft and its products, visit
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The term Remember the Milk is a trademark of Remember The Milk Inc. For more information about Remember The Milk and its products, visit
www.rememberthemilk.com.
The term Evernote® is a registered trademark of Evernote Corporation. For more information on Evernote and its products, visit www.evernote.com. The term Dropbox is a product and intellectual property of Dropbox Inc. For more information on Dropbox and its products, visit www.dropbox.com. The term The Pomodoro Technique is a registered trademark of Francesco Cirillo. For more information, visit www.pomodorotechnique.com.
The term Getting Things Done® is a registered trademarks of the David Allen Company. For more information on the David Allen Company’s products, visit their website at www.davidco.com.
This product refers to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® and Stephen Covey’s time management matrix and time management quadrants. It is not affiliated with, approved by or endorsed by Stephen Covey, FranklinCovey or any publishers or Stephen Covey’s work. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® is a registered trademark of FranklinCovey. For more information on FranklinCovey and their products, visit www.franklincovey.com.
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Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.Asian Efficiency®, Asian Efficiency Premium®, the A+E Logo®, related trade dress and intellectual property are trademarks of Asian Efficiency Limited, and may not be used without written permission.
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While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher and authors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising therefrom. Any organizations or websites referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or publisher endorses the information the organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Readers should be aware that Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.
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Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . 11
Introduction . . . . 12
Chapter 01: Simple Email Management . . . . 14
The Simple Guide to Managing Your Email Effectively . . 15
Action Steps . . . . 28
Chapter 02: Simple Task Management . . . . 29
Simple Task Management . . . . 30
Managing Your Task List . . . . 59
Action Steps . . . . 64
Chapter 03: Calendar and To-do List . . . . 65
How to Use Your Calendar . . . . 66
How To Use A Calendar and To-Do List With Each Other 71
Action Steps . . . . 76
Chapter 04: Rituals . . . . 78
Introducing Rituals . . . . 79
Morning Ritual . . . . 80
Action Steps for Morning Rituals . . . . 89
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Contents
Evening Ritual . . . . 91
Action Steps for Evening Rituals . . . . 96
In Closing . . . . 97
Chapter 05: Clear to Neutral . . . . 98
The One Habit That Stops You From Procrastinating . . . 99
Action Steps . . . . 104
Chapter 06: Eat That Frog . . . .105
Do Your Most Important Tasks In The Morning . . . . 106
Action Steps . . . . 110
Chapter 07: Beat Procrastination . . . .111
Beating Procrastination . . . . 112
Hero Mode: Productivity Super Powers . . . . 113
Action Steps for Implementing Hero Mode . . . . 117
Solar Flaring to Overcome Procrastination . . . . 119
Action Steps for Using Solar Flaring . . . . 121
Timeboxing . . . . 122
Timeboxing Technique Action Steps . . . . 125
Beating Procrastination Action Steps . . . . 126
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Contents
The Simple Guide to Going Paperless . . . . 128
Going Paperless with Your Magazines . . . . 140
Action Steps . . . . 143
Chapter 10: Organizing Your Files, Folders and
Documents . . . . 144
Organizing Your Files, Folders and Documents . . . . 145
Action Steps . . . . 156
Chapter 11: Time Tracking . . . .157
Basics of Time Tracking . . . . 158
Action Steps . . . . 182
Chapter 12: Putting It Together (Case Study) 183
Putting It Together . . . . 184
Implementation and Action Steps . . . . 194
In Closing . . . . 195
In Closing . . . . 196
Glossary . . . . 198
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IntroduCtIon
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for purchasing the Asian Efficiency Primer.
This work represents an introduction to the best of the best of Asian
Efficiency – we’ve taken our most high-impact and popular writing, cleaned it up, addressed issues that have arisen since it was written and put it together in an easy step-by-step format that any productivity novice can take, follow and implement.
This book has been written in a modular manner, meaning that you can pick and choose any chapter that you find most interesting and dive right in. However, you will get the most benefits from reading and working through the book in sequential order – future chapters do build on prior chapters. Here’s a brief overview of each chapter:
• Simple Email Management: A look into the high-stress world of
email, and how some simple guidelines and rules can keep it neat and organized.
• Simple Task Management: The basic principles of modern-day task management, and some examples of different applications you can use. • Calendar and To-do List: How to differentiate your calendar from our
to-do list, and how to use your calendar effectively and properly.
• Rituals: How to build a foundation of solid physical and mental energy every single day, skyrocketing your productivity.
• Clear to Neutral: A simple habit that lets you stop-and-start work effectively.
• Eat That Frog: How to really prioritize your days and get more things done than 90% of the population.
• Beating Procrastination: Some assorted techniques and strategies for beating procrastination. Think of them as tools to pull out when you really need them.
• Sex, Relationships & Productivity: The most controversial content we have ever published, rewritten with a big emphasis on actionable items. • Going Paperless: A brief guide to going paperless.
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IntroduCtIon
here’s how you keep your files and documents on your computer organized and accessible.
• Time Tracking: How to track the one metric that really matters, and some of the surprising conclusions it may give you.
• Putting it Together (Case Study): How the principles in this book look together in an integrated whole. Recommended reading after everything else.
You’ll notice that a lot of the screenshots used in this book are from Mac OS X – at Asian Efficiency, we love Macs, but if you’re on Windows or another platform, don’t let that distract you. The principles and underlying structure of the systems remains the same, and where possible we’ve included Windows/ Android alternatives to Apple products.
We want this book to be interactive. You’ll find a lot of hyperlinks scattered throughout the text, often to articles we have written on our blog or studies that we reference. None of these are required in the journey to become more productive, but they are there if you are interested.
For simplicity we use the third-person pronouns “he” and “she”
interchangeably and where possible the text has been presented as a
conversation between us, and you, the reader. “We” or “I” refers to the team at Asian Efficiency or the writer of the particular chapter.
Thanks again for making the purchase of the Asian Efficiency Primer – we hope you will enjoy it and get a lot out of it.
- The Asian Efficiency Team
Chapter 01: Simple
Email Management
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THE SIMPLE GUIDE TO MANAGING YOUR EMAIL
EFFECTIVELY
Managing your email has become an important part of modern knowledge work. As common it is for everyone to have email, most people still do not know how to properly manage their email inboxes. People often complain that email is one of their largest sources of distraction, and that using email ends up wasting a lot of valuable time.
One of the best things you can do for getting your email under control is to apply a folder structure and have a specific workflow that you can use. I am going to introduce to you a workflow that has been proven to be very effective for managing email.
For the purposes of this chapter, I will use Gmail as an example on how to use folders for managing your email. This idea can be applied to any other email providers too (Yahoo!, Hotmail, and so on) or email clients (Apple Mail, Postbox, Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, etc). So if you use something other than Gmail, don’t panic. You can use the same ideas for your email provider or application.
Our recommended email clients are:
• Mac – Mailplane, Postbox or Apple Mail.
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INBOX ZERO
The first idea I want you to understand is the idea of what some people call
Inbox Zero. Most people see their email inbox as the place where all emails
are stored, but I want you to start looking at your inbox differently. Here’s how I want you to look at your inbox:
View your email inbox as a temporary holding place where you need to start processing emails.
Put in other words, only unread emails are in your inbox. Processed and read emails are not in your inbox (they go somewhere else, as I will show you in a bit).
Each time you process your email the objective is to go through your
inbox and get the count to zero.
Each time you process your email, the goal should be to have your inbox count at zero. Psychologically it is much better to know that you have managed your email and that you only have to process whatever is in your inbox.
When your inbox is full of email, it makes it very hard to look for certain messages that you need to reply to, especially if you have to scan through hundreds of emails. Additionally, looking for emails you are awaiting for a
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response to is a pain when your inbox count is at 295,346. There is a simple solution for this as we will see later.
A clear and empty inbox give you a sense of organization and the feeling that you have email under control. That’s why it’s important to make that mental shift on how you view your inbox and what its purpose is. Start looking at
your inbox as a temporary holding place of emails you still need to read and decide on what to do with. Each time you process your inbox you want to get
it to be zero.
FOLDER STRUCTURE
Let’s get to the setup of the workflow. This workflow requires for you to create 3 folders: Reply, Waiting and Archive.
Here is what each folder is meant for:
• Reply: all emails go in here that take longer than 2 minutes to respond to. • Waiting: all emails go in here where you are waiting for a response or
want to process later.
• Archive: all other emails go in here that you want to be able to access later.
Whichever email client you use, you need to setup these folders. In this
chapter I will use Gmail as an example. Within Gmail, they use folders too but they call them “labels”. Here is how you set them up:
1. Top right corner, click on the Settings Gear image and then click on
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Go to Settings Gear > Settings (top right corner) 2. Click on the Labels tab.
Click on the Labels tab to create the labels / folders.
3. Create the new labels Reply and Waiting. Gmail already comes with an
Archive folder called All Mail so you don’t have to create one (but you do
in your email clients and other email providers).
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PURPOSE REPLY FOLDER
Some typical emails that belong in the Reply folder:
• Someone is requesting you to do something (with or without deadline). – Examples include submitting reports, verifying something, and taking
on any task.
• Someone is asking you to respond to something but it requires more deep thoughts from you to respond.
– Examples include people asking for your opinion or asking about your availability for an event.
After you’ve replied to emails in this folder, you then move them to the Archive folder. Within Gmail it’s easy, you remove the Reply label by clicking on the X next to the label name.
Removing a label from an email in Gmail
PURPOSE WAITING FOLDER
Typical emails that go in the Waiting folder:
• Tracking codes for UPS or Fedex packages coming your way.
– Examples include shipping tracking numbers from online shopping. • You delegated a task and you are waiting for a response / result.
– Examples include emails from (virtual) assistants, employees, and anyone you are waiting to hear from.
• Confirmation from someone.
– Examples include asking another person if he/she received something from you (like a package).
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THE 2-MINUTE RULE
Another golden rule of managing your email is the 2-minute rule. It’s really simple:
if it takes longer than 2 minutes to process or reply to an email, reply to it later and put the email in the Reply folder. Otherwise, reply right away.
When it comes to managing your email, you want to apply the productivity principle of touch it once. Do not reread the same email – that’s just a waste of time. Especially when you have to deal with dozens or hundreds of emails every day. To put it another way, as soon as you’re reading an email – decide right away what to do with it. Don’t let it linger around in your inbox because you will forget what the email is about and this will force you to read it again. Touch it once and move to the next email.
The value in this rule is that you go through your inbox really fast, and you initially process only what is necessary. If someone needs a quick response, you’ve taken care of that. If an email needs more attention, you can work on that later and prioritize which email gets the most attention (after your inbox is processed and at zero).
What most people tend to do is process emails one-by-one and sequentially handle each email as they receive it throughout the day. This is a very
inefficient way of managing your email, because you aren’t prioritizing.
Let’s say you have 10 unread emails in your inbox. How do you know if email #2 is more important and higher priority than email #9? You don’t know if you
spend a lot of time on each email. That’s why this time limit rule is so effective
because you will quickly find which emails need the most attention.
Two minutes is the limit I’ve set for myself. Adjust this for yourself based on how much time a day you want to spend on email and the volume of emails you get. Personally, I want to spend less than one hour a day on managing my email. At my current volume, I receive fewer than 50 emails a day, and with the 2-minute limit I get to manage my email daily in less than an hour.
As a guideline: the more emails you get per day, the shorter your time limit
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I cannot stress this enough, but when it comes to managing your email you really want to apply the touch it once rule. You will waste a lot of time by rereading emails over the span of weeks and by just implementing this rule you’ll save a lot of time.
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WORKFLOW
To quickly recap – as you process your inbox, you want to apply the inbox
zero, 2-minute rule and the touch it once principle. These are essential to
this workflow and now let’s tie all the pieces together. Below is a simplified diagram of the workflow.
Email Management Workflow Diagram
Once you have your inbox at zero, that’s when you can effectively start managing your email. By default, you know that all emails in the Reply folder require your focus and attention (they require more than 2 minutes of your
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time).
When you apply this workflow this is what happens:
• As you process your email, you will have responded to all the messages that didn’t require much attention from you (each email took less than two minutes to respond to).
• Anything that was important is in the Reply folder, and you can work on it later and prioritize accordingly (each emails takes longer than two minutes to respond to).
Once your inbox is zero that’s when you can decide how you are going to prioritize your emails in your Reply folder. You should be able to process your inbox fairly quickly by scanning the email content, decide what the next step is and process accordingly.
After your inbox is at zero, usually you want to process your Reply folder next and treat each email with focus (because you know they require more attention hence why there are in the Reply folder).
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For more intermediate and advanced readers: you can make every email inyour Reply folder an action item on your to-do list. This is actually what I prefer but it requires that you use a to-do list or task manager (we’ll discuss tasks in the next chapter). By the mere fact that emails that go to the Reply folder, I want to make it an item in my task manager.
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It also is not uncommon that a request in the email requires you to do
something that might be a (big) project. Your boss might say, “Hey I want you
to research what the 3 hottest stocks are in precious metals and recommend to me which one has the best prospects. Please send it to me within 5 days from today.”
Now this is an extreme example, but I hope you see what I mean. With such emails you have to create an action item (or even a project), work on it, finish it, and then reply to that email.
A simpler example might be that a friend is asking if you can join her for a concert in two weeks. What you can do is respond right away saying you’ll look into it, put it on your to-do list and figure it out later. Three days later, after you figured out your schedule, you reply saying “Yes I’ve checked my
schedule and I’m available. Let’s do it!” and put a check mark on your to-do list
action item.
SEPARATING EMAIL FROM TO-DO LISTS
A common mistake people make is that they see their email inbox as a to-do list manager. Rather, you want separate a to-do list manager and email inbox. You want to view your email inbox as another source of where tasks might come from. Just like your boss might give you a task, or a phone call, so is email another source.
By creating action items on your to-do list you force yourself to stay within the email client (or on the same website) and you prevent yourself going off doing something else. It’s common to read an email, click on a link, read something interesting, click on something else and before you know it you’ve wasted an hour. That’s one of the many reasons why treating your email inbox simultaneously as your to-do list is so dangerous. Please try to avoid that and use a separate task manager (such as OmniFocus).
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WORKFLOW EXAMPLE
The key to make this system work is that you have to review your folders regularly. A good habit to this workflow is to check your email twice a day at
fixed times. That means going through your inbox twice in one day and where
you apply the inbox zero concept and 2-minute rule. As an example, I will show you how I manage my email.
• Monday-Friday: process email at 11am. • Monday-Friday: process email at 4pm.
• Friday: review Waiting folder at 4:30pm (usually after processing email).
This is roughly how my days look like where you can see when and how long I manage my email
I process my email only twice a day and at fixed times. Once in the morning
after I’ve done my most important tasks (never check email first thing in the morning, it will kill your productivity). By the time I’m processing my emails, I have already done my highest level activities and anything after that is nice to complete.
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Between the time I process my email inbox the first time and second time, there is a gap of time I can use to get work done. This work may include tasks that I got assigned through email earlier that morning. As I’m processing my email inbox the second time, I can update my task list again and prepare my to-do list for tomorrow (if I got any emails with assignments and tasks handed to me). By checking my email again at the end of the day, I can setup what my most important tasks are the next day.
Before the weekend hits, that’s when I review my Waiting folder. I do this once a week. I treat it like a separate inbox and go through it as fast as possible. If I didn’t get a response from someone within 48 hours, I’ll send a quick reminder.
What I really like about this workflow is the sequencing of doing your most important tasks first, then checking email, and then planning. Since I’ve already completed work between 9 and 11 (I usually start working at 9) without the distraction of email, by the time I’m checking my email I’ve already done the most important thing I could do that day. Whatever tasks I might get my way through email can be done later that day or some other time.
• 9-11am: do highest leverage work (can be stuff from email from yesterday).
• 11-11 .30am: process emails.
• 12 .30pm – 3 .30pm: do other work (that include new tasks just processed from emails earlier in the morning).
• 4pm – 4 .30pm: process emails.
• 4 .30pm – 4 .45pm: manage to-do list based on tasks worked on today and the last set of emails.
This is a great workflow for people who work in an environment where email is the main communication medium.
Now this was a lot of theory and examples. It can be overwhelming to learn, but experiment with and implement this email management workflow.
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ACTION STEPS
1. Create the 3 folders: Reply, Waiting and Archive. 2. Move your current inbox into the Archive folder. 3. Starting now, follow this workflow.
4. Figure out how many times a day you want to check your email and at what times.
Chapter 02: Simple
Task Management
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SIMPLE TASK MANAGEMENT
Task Management is a simple productivity concept but one that is often overlooked. Anyone who has tried to get more organized, or get their priorities or life in order has inevitably used a task list of some sort. This chapter will explain exactly what a task is (and how it differs from say an appointment or a piece of information), how to prioritize, organize and manage your tasks on an ongoing basis. It will also provide some strategies for managing your task list so that it doesn’t grow nonstop and spiral out of control.
We are going to introduce four different methods for managing your task list in this chapter – pen and paper, a text or Microsoft Word document, Things (for Mac) and Remember the Milk (online). All these solutions work, and we’ll outline their pros and cons as we go along.
Note: “Task”, “To-do” and “Action” are used interchangeably.
If you read this and decide that you need a more complex solution, we highly recommend OmniFocus (for Mac and iOS) and our guide, OmniFocus Premium Posts.
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WHAT IS A TASK
A task is an actionable item that needs to be done now, or at a later date. By exclusion, a task is something that you have to do that doesn’t occupy a specific time slot on your schedule (those are appointments).
It is important to not confuse tasks and information. The act of filing
information or organizing a piece of information is a task, but the information itself is not.
For example:
• Dinner with Suzie on Friday – appointment.
• Call restaurant to make dinner reservations for Friday – task. • Restaurant’s address, phone number and directions – information. People who are familiar with task lists will recognize the above immediately. Once upon a time, tasks were single-sentence descriptions in numerical order. Now, they are far more complex – you now have the ability to describe tasks in terms of the projects they belong to as well as the contexts (tools, locations, mindsets) they belong to. While to some it may seem that this extra information attached to each task is unnecessary, in reality it has increased the level of clarity we have over our to-do lists by allowing us to see the relationship between individual actions, and how they all add up to our goals and different parts of our lives.
WHY TASK MANAGEMENT
Task management is important, for the simple reason that success in this world (however you wish to define it) seems to be the result of 1) knowing what you want, and then 2) directing action towards it. Without a clear list of tasks, there can be no directed action.
At the most basic level, tasks allow you to externalize the ideas and thoughts you have floating in your head. We all have thoughts and ideas that in the moment we think are fantastic, and tell ourselves “I’ll remember that later”. Well, maybe we will or maybe we won’t. Writing them down and turning them into actionable items guarantees that you will.
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organizational skills to decide what is important and what is not. Is watching reruns of Lost more important, or is doing your laundry?
Actively managed task lists also create a certain degree of accountability. It very clearly indicates where we have fallen short in terms of directed action, and is a good (and somewhat pressure-free) wakeup call to get more done.
THE 2-MINUTE RULE
Here’s the 2-minute rule from Getting Things Done®: “If it takes less than 2 minutes to do it, do it now.”
If you think of something to do and it takes less than 2 minutes to handle, do it now. Don’t put it in your task list. Try to apply this anytime you’re dealing with something to do.
TASK HIERARCHIES
This is the most complex part of this guide. Different people have different ways of dividing up the different parts of their lives, but the one that we have seen fairly often and that works for most people is a division into:
• Health
• Wealth (including career)
• Relationships (friends, family, significant other) • General Happiness (catchall for everything else) • Errands (mundane everyday tasks)
It would therefore make sense for our tasks to fall into these categories too. The Errands category is for the everyday mundane that doesn’t belong anywhere else – things like going to the bank, doing the laundry, doing the grocery shopping etc.
Now for some people this is too structured. In which case we would recommend: Projects: personal projects you have that you want to complete, like redecorating the living room, cleaning out the garage, or finishing a certain book.
• Events: planning a dinner party, outlining a vacation, organizing a family trip out of town.
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• Things For Later: ideas that you want to revisit one day, just not at the moment.
PEN AND PAPER TASK MANAGEMENT
Pen and paper is the simplest form of task management, and the one that most people use (to varying degrees). The biggest problem with pen and paper is actually that most people start to develop a great task management system, then they stop using it or maintaining it due to the busyness of their lives. The benefits of paper are many. It is very simple – you don’t need any complicated or expensive equipment or apps, and it’s something you could easily teach to your mom/dad/family or any non-technically-inclined friends. That’s not to say there aren’t downsides compared to other task management systems – the biggest probably being that you have to copy tasks over to the next day every single day to maintain a functioning system. For this reason, while you can work with pen and paper, we highly recommend a digital system (outlined later in this chapter).
With that out of the way, here’s what you’ll need:
• Paper. Preferably in the form of a notebook (We recommend US Letter or A4/A5 size).
• Post-it notes.
• At least 2 different colored pens – one for writing, one for highlighting. Getting this system started is straightforward. Sit down, and take the time to write down everything on your mind. Write down all the things you have to do, all the random thoughts you have – everything. Grocery shopping for this week? Write it down. Doctor’s appointment in 2 weeks? Write it down. Call Jean back about dinner next week? Write it down.
You should end up with a large list of unorganized thoughts and actions the first time you do this.
Now you need to sort. In general, there will be three types of items you have listed: tasks, appointments and information.
You want to separate these out. Appointments will go in your schedule or calendar (see the chapter on Calendar and To-do List). Information should
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technically go into a personal wiki or database (covered in the chapter on
Going Paperless), but if we’re being simple here, just transfer it to another notebook for the time being. Tasks are what you want to focus on for now. Taking this list of tasks, start ordering them – start at 1, and go through to x, where x is the number of items on your list.
There’s no real need for categories with a paper system, it just tends to complicate things. You may find that certain tasks group together around events or projects, and if they do you can list them that way.
Now that you have your initial list of tasks, it’s time to learn how to use the system effectively. You’ll have two lists: an “immediate action” list, and an
“everything else” list.
At the start of every day, pick a new page in your workbook, put down
today’s date, and list down all the “immediate action” items on your task list. These are tasks that are due today, or overdue, or will be completed in the next couple of days. Usually about 5 items is right for most people. All the other tasks, should sit in a separate notebook or in a page at the back of your notebook – we’ll come back to this second list later.
Now as you start your day, look at task number one, and start doing it until it’s done. Then onto task number two, and three and so on…
As you complete each task, tick it off or cross it out using a different colored pen. You can also reorganize the order of tasks on-the-fly if necessary (just cross out the numbers and write beside them).
At the end of every day, transfer everything left over to the next day. Now is also the time to take a look at that second “everything else” list, and see what needs to brought into your “immediate action” list for the next day.
If you have random thoughts or ideas during the day, grab a post-it and write it down. At the end of the day, the content of these post-its should either go into your “immediate action” list or “everything else” list – the post-its themselves should go in the bin.
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Day 01
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Here’s the “everything else” list where tasks are crossed off and added on a daily basis. You may want to start a new
one of these every week.
Now we’re going to take this sample list of tasks, and show you how to set it up in Microsoft Word or more fully-featured task management applications.
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NOTEPAD, TEXTEDIT AND MICROSOFT WORD TASK MANAGEMENT
Digital text or what we like to call “Microsoft Word Task Management” is the next logical step towards more easily automating and managing your task list. It is essentially the same as pen and paper task management, excepteverything is stored as files on your computer rather than in a notebook. This system is best used in an office environment, and where you don’t have the ability to mix your business and personal tasks together into one list.
Starting to use the system is the same as with pen and paper – begin by typing out everything you have on your mind. Sort out the appointments and information, and then organize the remaining tasks into a hierarchical order. You will likely want to use the task hierarchy we mentioned earlier here, especially in a workplace where things are completed based on projects. Using the system is a little different.
You will have one new document per each day. The filename should be something like tasklist-yyyymmdd.docx, i.e., tasklist-20130201.docx. This document will have both your task list (at the top), and at the bottom, it should have your “everything else” list – your items for later action. At the beginning of each day, sort your tasks into relevant order (under
projects or subsections if necessary) and begin working through them. At the end of each day, use the “save as” function to create a file with the next day’s date. As with pen and paper, move items into or out of the “everything else” section as necessary. Any random notes and ideas you accumulate throughout the day should go at the bottom in the “everything else” section.
While this system works best in the workplace, you can also adopt it for personal use at home. Simply replace your work projects with a list of your personal projects, events and errands.
Here are some example documents showing the progression of tasks over a few days, and how the system is used to manage them.
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THINGS (FOR MAC) TASK MANAGEMENT
Of the systems that have been outlined here, Things (for Mac only – if you are on Windows, see the next section), is the most complex yet the most elegant. It’s also our recommended choice for learning how to use tasks to boost your personal productivity.
Things has a distinct hierarchy built into the software. There are: • Tasks.
• Projects.
• Areas of Responsibility. These are equivalent to:
• Tasks: individual actions.
• Projects: sets of tasks that have a finite limit. i.e., after a certain number of tasks, the project can be considered complete.
• Areas of Responsibility: an ongoing list of activities that is never complete.
If we look back at our task hierarchy, we see that Areas of Responsibility match up well to the general areas of Health, Wealth, Relationship and
Happiness. They also serve well as a “Things for Later” list and an “Everyday” list.
If you use Things, it is highly recommended that you use this particular
hierarchy. If you choose instead to go organize around personal projects and events, that is also possible. You will likely not use Areas of Responsibility in that case, except for your “Things for Later” and “Everyday” lists.
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As with the prior two systems, begin by collecting all your thoughts and actionable items in one place. In Things, this is called the Inbox and can be found at the top of the sidebar.
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The next step is to establish your task hierarchy. You should create an “Everyday/Errands” Area of Responsibility. The “for later” area found in the prior two systems is replaced in Things by the “Someday” list.
If you choose to use structured categories, set them up too:
If not, then you will create appropriate projects as you sort the tasks now collected in your inbox, which is the next step.
Take each of the tasks in your Inbox, and put them into projects as necessary, and put those projects (or tasks) into the appropriate Areas of Responsibility. One of the great benefits of a task manager like Things is that you can assign due dates to individual tasks (and projects) in a useable fashion. So, be sure to assign due dates where required, and appropriate notes and tags to each task as necessary.
Using this system is as deceptively simple. Use the different views in Things to see your tasks through different perspectives and filters.
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The Today view lets you see everything immediately due – similar to the “immediate actions” lists from the pen and paper and digital text systems.
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The Next view lets you see the next available actions across each of your projects.
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The Scheduled view lets you see items set to start at a later date.
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The Someday view lets you see items that are actionable later.
Things Someday View
We suggest starting with the Today or Next views at the beginning of the day, and switching back and forth as necessary. As you complete a task, simply check it off your list (you can always review what you’ve completed in the Logbook).
At the end of each day, review what you’ve done in the Logbook, then look at the Someday and Inbox views and move items into projects as necessary. Any thoughts or ideas you collect during the day should go into the Things Inbox, for categorization at the end of each day.
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no need to create a new list for each day – the list is always active, and automatically carries onto the next day. The other big benefit is the ability to synchronize with your iPhone and have your task list on-the-go all the time.
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REMEMBER THE MILK
Remember The Milk (RTM) is a simple web-based task manager that also has mobile applications across most major platforms. It’s a good alternative for Windows users or people who don’t want to be tied to any one particular operating system.
This is not to say that other web-based applications like Wunderlist can’t be used – almost any task manager will work, it just seems that a lot of productive people who use Windows use Remember The Milk.
The first thing you want to do is sign up – email, Facebook or Google login – any will work.
Remember The Milk signup page Once you’re signed up, be sure to log in.
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Remember the Milk’s hierarchical layout is a little different from the solutions we’ve outlined before. In this case, Remember The Milk uses what are called “Lists” to equivocate to both Areas of Life and Projects. You can modify these by going to Settings > Lists.
Adding in our areas of life under Lists in Remember The Milk
You’ll notice that for differentiation we’ve prefixed each list with “Area” or “Project”.
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As with all applications and methods that we’ve mentioned before, you want to input your tasks and items into Remember The Milk’s “Inbox” list. From there, you can drag and drop items into the different relevant Lists (Areas and Projects).
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Your “someday” items can sit in a separate list called “Someday”.
Someday list view
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Here is the Inbox where items are input:
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You can of course, navigate to each individual list to see what you need to do, but that is largely inefficient. It is much better to use the Overview view to see what is due today, tomorrow or overdue.
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The Weekly Planner view is also not bad for forecasting what you have due in the upcoming days.
Weekly Planner View
Remember The Milk also uses a priority system for tasks – you can assign each task priority 1-3, similar to how you assign tasks as “Today” tasks in Things or select tasks for “Immediate Action” in the text-based systems. It can be found under the “More Actions” drop-down menu. We recommend keeping it simple – everything immediately actionable due today gets a Priority of 1, everything else has no priority.
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You can use these priorities as a filter in either Overview view (flicking between Today/Tomorrow/Weekly Planner), in each individual list, or in the “All Tasks” list.
All Tasks View
As you complete tasks, remember to check them off as “Complete”!
If you have any other devices you use, Remember The Milk also syncs across to your smartphone and other devices.
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GENERAL PRINCIPLES
All these task management systems are easy to use and apply with a tiny bit of effort. They are all built on solid principles that should be in every task management system, namely:
• Easy to maintain.
• Sequential order of tasks. • Ability to capture new tasks.
• Recognizing that not everything is immediately actionable.
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MANAGING YOUR TASK LIST
As we collect more and more tasks and more and more things to do, our tasks lists can start to grow quite complex. Here are some guidelines that will help you keep you task list manageable. Think of them as guideposts to help you decide what to do with a particular task when you’re unsure.
1. CLEAR YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY
Your inbox is where you collect all stray thoughts and incoming items. It can be physical (an in-tray), note-based (post-it notes in the pen and paper system above) or digital (in the case of a text document you can create an inbox
section, and for apps there will usually be a dedicated inbox area).
While our inboxes are a great place to collect things we need to do and process, we must remember to clear them at least once per day. The digital version of clutter is an inbox that is overfilling with tasks and items.
Just like your email inbox, you must set aside some time every day to clear your task inbox. Having an overly-full inbox is not good – it becomes this big, scary monster that we’re afraid to look at because it just keeps on growing and growing and growing… and this leads to procrastination and missing important items.
Try to clear your inbox at least once a day. Either do it, file it in a list or delete it.
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2. GET RID OF JUNK
We all have times when we come up with a great idea or something we need to do, so we write it down. Sometimes days, weeks or even months later, we find out that we never acted on them and they’re just filling up space on our to-do list.
If an item has been on your list for too long, delete it! If it is really important, it will find a way back on your to-do list. Until then, out of sight, out of mind.
3. 80/20 YOUR ACTIVE PROJECTS
There is no point in having over dozens of active projects (collections of tasks) on your task list, because you cannot work on all of them at the same time. You have to focus on your most important projects, or in other words apply the 80/20 rule. Keep 3-5 active projects and focus on those.
4. NO MORE OUTCOMES
Stop writing down outcomes and start writing down actionable steps. When you read your to-do list, you should be able to know right away what you should be doing next. What a lot people often do is that they write down the outcome they want, but the problem is that they often don’t know how to get started which leads to procrastination.
Instead of writing down “supplements”, write down “Go to the pharmacy and buy multivitamins”.
Instead of “boxing”, you write “Order the PPV package for Saturday’s match”. You get the idea.
5. START YOUR TASKS WITH VERBS
To follow up on the previous point, to make your action items actionable you should start all of them with a verb. This is really simple trick and it does wonders. For example:
• Email John about the Q2 reports
• Text Gina for availability for a date this Saturday • Call Alan and ask which car mechanic he uses • Take the trash out
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By starting your task with a verb, you know right away what to do. This also helps you avoid writing down outcomes. One verb to avoid using is “contact” because it is too ambiguous; it could mean texting, calling, emailing, and so on. When you read an action item, there should be no ambiguity on what needs to be done.
6. WHY?
We have written before on the power of having a why. When you deal with your tasks, ask yourself these questions:
• Why am I adding this to my to-do list?
If you don’t plan to act on it, don’t bother to add it. • Why do I need to do this?
If you are not the best person to do this, outsource it. • Why is this important?
If it is not important, delete it.
7. ADD A TIME ESTIMATE
Not all tasks take the same amount of time. By adding an estimation to your tasks you will see if a task is too big to handle. When a task takes longer than an hour, that is a sign that the task is too big. Break it down into smaller tasks, because if the task is too big you are more likely to procrastinate. About 20 minutes is right for most tasks.
An example of a task that is too big is “renovate the living room”. This will definitely take more than an hour to complete and it involves a lot of other tasks, so it is a good idea to break this down and maybe even make this a project.
In the beginning we are all horrible at estimating, but as we continue to
practice, we get better at it. You will build an intuition for how long something will take which in turn makes you even better at managing your time.
A simple notation to use is to follow the task name with (x minutes) – e.g., “Email Thanh about TPS reports (5 minutes)”.
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8. HAVE YOUR NEXT ACTIONS READY
Popularized in the book Getting Things Done®, next actions are tasks that are need to be done to move a project forward. You can also look it at it from another perspective: what is the bottleneck of a given project? By removing the bottleneck, your project isn’t stalled anymore and you can start working towards completing it.
If you ever feel like you have some free time and you don’t know what you could be doing next, that’s a red flag. You either are overwhelmed by the amount of things you have on your list, or you haven’t set up your to-do list properly. If the latter is the case, get out your next actions list and start working on them.
9. REVIEW ONCE A WEEK
Reviewing your to-do list is the process of going over each and every project and making sure everything is in order. To keep your to-do list in order, you need to at least review it once a week. Just like you should go see a dentist every six months for a checkup, the same idea applies to your to-do list but on a weekly basis.
If you tend to procrastinate on your weekly reviews, that’s a sign that you have too many projects going on. A review shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.
10. HAVE REFERENCE INFORMATION READY
To avoid procrastination you want to make it as easy as possible to get started on things (that’s why we recommend the habit of clearing to neutral – see the chapter on Clear to Neutral). Any friction can to lead to procrastination. For example, if you need to call your local grocery store but you don’t have the phone number within reach, you will have to first search for it. This extra step, or barrier to what you want to achieve, is a waste of time and if you’re not in the right mood or state of mind you will procrastinate.
If you need to call someone, have the phone number as part of your action item. For example, instead of writing “Call grocery store and ask for availability of Dutch peanut butter” you would write down “Call grocery store (123-555-5555) and ask for availability of Dutch peanut butter”. If you need to go to a
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store, have its address attached to the notes of the task. If you need to access a document, attach the document to the task (or reference it).
Make it easy for yourself to get things done right away so you don’t waste time looking up reference materials.
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ACTION STEPS
At this point you should have a good idea of how important task lists are and how to construct and use one. Here’s what you do:
1. Do a brain dump of everything in your head – any stray ideas, things you need to remember to do or otherwise. Collect it all onto paper.
2. You may also want to do the same with any post-it notes that you may have and any other physical reminders too. Steps 1 and 2 help you get all the important things you need to do in one place, which makes them much easier to handle.
3. Pick your task management system of choice. Pen & paper works well. So does a simple text or Word document (our recommended starting point). If you want to get fancy, go with Things or Remember The Milk.
4. Input the items collected in steps 1 and 2 into your task management system.
5. Follow the details outlined in this chapter to sort into your different projects, categories or areas. Set appropriate due dates.
6. At this point everything should be set up and ready to use – you simply need to reference your task list as you go about working.
7. Follow the 10 tips outlined in the latter half of this chapter for keeping your task management system clean and functional.
Chapter 03:
Calendar and To-do
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HOW TO USE YOUR CALENDAR
The simple calendar is an almighty tool that tends to get swept away underneath all the flashy task managers, productivity systems and context-specific smartphones apps that we have nowadays.
The shocking truth is that most business professionals simply don’t know how to take advantage of their calendar applications – despite them being pretty much default on every platform in use (desktop, phone), and very easy to set up.
We’ll be making the assumption that you will use your calendar between your desktop and phone – some sync solutions will be mentioned below.
SOFTWARE AND SYNC
In Apple’s ecosystem we highly suggest you stick with iCloud, which will pull data from your Mac to your iPhone to your iPad pretty much seamlessly. It does get the occasional hiccup maybe once or twice a year, but it’s otherwise hassle-free.
We don’t use Windows or Android (much), but from talking with users on those platforms syncing seems to be a patchwork of solutions. The easiest solution it would seem is to use Google Calendar and their sync solution, which goes something like this:
• Outlook syncs to Google Calendar (on desktop). • Google Calendar syncs to calendar app (on phone).
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As a bonus mention for Apple users, while the default Calendar applications are pretty good, we like:
• BusyCal for the desktop (easier to use than the standard calendar app). • WeekCal for the iPhone and iPad (best calendar app on iOS by far).
WHAT GOES IN YOUR CALENDAR
Anything that you have to do at a specific time is an appointment that should go in your calendar.
You can contrast this with tasks, which are things that can be done at any time.
Most people are familiar with what should go in their calendar: • The time you’re at work.
• Meetings at work. • Social engagements.
• Reserved time for things you are working on (“time blocking”). • Deadlines of important projects and commitments.
• Exercise/gym time.
This can be extended further to include things like:
• Scheduled meal times (especially if you’re on a specialized nutrition plan). • Morning/Evening rituals (see next chapter).
It seems that most people tend to think about what goes in their calendars as “official” and something that they try to stick to. You can use this to your advantage and schedule in time to work on important projects in your life.
STRUCTURING YOUR CALENDAR
A really common question that we get is how rigidly or in how much detail should people structure their calendars.
What this comes down to is your life, your lifestyle and what you have going on. Some people find it highly beneficial to have meal times, their morning ritual and work times in their calendar. Other people will probably hate having those things in there as a reminder of what they should be doing.
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maybe 30 minutes max as the smallest unit of time you have in your calendar. Any more than that and the amount of micromanagement and
mode-switching makes it counterproductive.
Here’s what we found: most people adhere too rigidly, or too loosely to their
calendar.
The best approach is to respect your calendar, and to see it as your vision of an “ideal day”, and to put in your best effort to follow it – but to also recognize that sometimes things crop up and you need to be flexible.
Simply put: try your best to follow it, and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t
100%.
With that in mind, here are some structures you can put in place to turn your level of adherence into feedback:
• Decide what meetings or appointments you won’t be flexible on – e.g., meetings at work, particular social engagements, scheduled morning/ evening rituals.
• When you do deviate from your preset schedule, make a note in your
journal. If it happens a lot, that is a sign that your schedule needs to change.
A quick bonus tip is to use all-day events to highlight significant periods across a number of days, for example:
• When an important business contact is in town. • When you are away on a conference.
STRATEGIC USE OF REMINDERS
One of the best uses for your calendar is to set strategic reminders for yourself.
Most people already have alerts turned on for their desktop and phone-based calendars, and you can use this to your advantage by setting yourself alerts for things you want to remember throughout the day.
Here’s how it’s done:
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something.
2. Input what you need to be reminded of in the appointment title. 3. Set the alert to “on date of event” or “at start of event”.
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This is incredibly, incredibly useful and can be used to remind you of things like: • When you need to drop off/pick up your laundry.
• Meal and supplement times, especially if you’re on a complex nutritional plan.
• Important time-blocked events, like when you should be doing some mind-expanding reading or working on an important side-project. Why not set task alerts via something like OmniFocus or any other task manager? Because you can’t define which specific tasks have alerts, and if you’re a complex (or efficient) task organizer, you probably have 10-20 things due the next day, and alerts for all of them going off is not that helpful.
Remember to also use alerts for “normal” appointments like social
engagements to help you get there on time. It still amazes me the number of people who cannot estimate transit time and set themselves a reminder to leave home/work the required 15/30/60 minutes beforehand to make it to an event on time.
MAKING IT WORK WITH EVERYTHING ELSE
So where does your calendar fit in your workflow?Remember that tasks go into a dedicated task manager or todo list – not your calendar. And despite various software companies’ attempts, don’t try to combine the two (more on that in the next section).
You should look at your calendar in the morning to see the pace and rhythm of your day, then as you need to, refer to it throughout the day. As with your tasks, also take a look at the end of the day and work out what you’ve done (or not), and see what you’re doing to do tomorrow.
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HOW TO USE A CALENDAR AND TO-DO LIST WITH
EACH OTHER
A lot of people use their calendar as their daily to-do list. Most of us learned it ad-hoc that we put the things we need to do in our calendar, but we think that’s a bad approach to planning. We want to show you how to use your calendar more efficiently together with your to-do list. Each has its own functions and responsibilities, but they can work great in harmony once you know how.
TASK MANAGEMENT 101
Earlier in this chapter we covered basic ground on how to use a calendar. We will recap some of the basics of task management here but we recommend that you read the chapter on Simple Task Management for further details. In short, I want you to view your tasks on your to-do list as things you need to do that have no strict deadline. In other words, your tasks have no specific date or time attached.
Nowadays we have so many things on our plate that there is no way we can do them all. Especially things that we cannot do within the next week(s) or month(s) but we still need to do the at some point. Where do you keep this information?
That’s right, on your to-do list.
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a week. That’s when you go over your to-do list, and see which tasks need attention, which can be deleted, and which tasks can be added to projects. Maintaining your to-do list is very important because you will use this
information for planning your days and weeks ahead. Again, if this is all new to you I highly suggest reading the chapter on Simple Task Management.
CALENDAR + TO-DO LIST
Now that we have covered how to use a calendar and to-do list, it’s time to show you how powerful they can be together. The starting point of planning is knowing what commitments you have already. Once you know that, that’s when you can see which tasks on your to-do lists can taken care of on which days.
For example, when you’re planning and you notice that on a Tuesday you have a lot of meetings and appointments, then you know planning a lot of tasks on Tuesday is a bad idea. Whereas if you notice that on a Wednesday you don’t have a lot of items on your calendar, you could schedule that you work on specific tasks that day.
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This is how using a to-do list and calendar together can be very powerful. You can plan how much you want to get done on specific days.
Make sure you review every week your to-do list and calendar. Start looking first on your calendar how busy you are and supplement days with tasks that you have on your to-do lists.
GETTING STARTED WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS
Using a calendar and to-do list together is a great idea but it takes a little bit of practice. Doing this syncing between calendar and to-do list on paper can be very tedious with a wall calendar. That’s why we recommend you use software as your solution.
There are many calendars and to-do lists / task managers that can mesh together really well. We tend to be a bit biased because we love OmniFocus (OS X) and Calendar (built in OS X) so with that endorsement out of the way, here are some other recommendations.
CALENDARS
• Google Calendar (web)
• Microsoft Outlook (Windows) • BusyCal (OS X)
TO-DO LISTS / TASK MANAGERS
• Remember the Milk (web) • Microsoft Outlook (Windows) • Things (OS X)
To get your feet wet on the Mac, you should try out Things in harmony with Calendar.
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For beginners on a Mac, we recommend using Things with Calendar
For Windows users, Microsoft Outlook is the most popular option. It has a built in to-do list manager and calendar. Plus it handles all your email too so these options can all work great together. The learning curve is pretty simple and Microsoft has a simple training course for managing Outlook with email, calendar, and to-do list.
Microsoft Outlook has a built in calendar and to-do list. Great for people who also use it as their primary email client and don’t want to get too fancy.
In case you want to manage your email better, read the chapter on Email Management. Regardless of which operating system or email client you use, the chapter also explains how to use email, to-do lists, and calendars together. In case you don’t want to tie yourself to an operating system, there are great web based solutions too. Google Calendar is one of the best online calendar applications out there. For task managers, Remember the Milk is the most popular. These two work together well too.
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device, as long as you have an internet connection. Sign up for RTM and it will show you how you can sync it with your Google Calendar.
For a web based solution, Remember the Milk and Google Calendar is a great one
Now I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this lethal combination before, but for the advanced readers on Macs you should try OmniFocus and Calendar together. They work really well together, especially when you put certain contexts on your Calendar. A better approach is if you have your Calendar synced with iCloud so you can access and manage your calendar anywhere.
If you want to reach Asian Efficiency level, you need to have OmniFocus and BusyCal Yours truly uses OmniFocus and BusyCal (Calendar on steroids) together with Google Calendar. I love the interface and features of BusyCal over Calendar’s. It’s similar, simpler, and faster. Plus it can sync with Google Calendar which I use a lot in combination with other Google services.