I'm an inveterate fiddler and am always trying out different ways of doing things in an attempt to find the best one. Often the search for the optimum approach becomes more important to me than actually getting the job done. This is sometimes es a good thing, and sometimes not so good. The worst outcome has been the numerous experiments in keeping well organised, most of which have resulted in reduced levels of productivity. Although it goes totally against the grain of my being, the conclusion is inevitable. A simple system that I stick to is preferable to a perfect one. And I have one now that seems to work pretty well.
The thing that always trips me up is the inter-relationship between the todo list, the calendar and the inbox. It is extremely easy to focus on one of them to the exclusion of the others. In particular using the inbox as a todo list is really tempting. Also, if you let it get out of control you really can't avoid it becoming a de facto to do list. If there is stuff you need to do in there you have got to pay attention to it. There is also the almost unavoidable tendency to leave stuff you don't want to deal with in there for future reference.
The todo list on the other hand gets stuffed full of things you really mean to do some day, but never actually do. It soon becomes horrifically long and you don't dare look at it.
Which leaves the calendar. This is the one that it is easiest to ignore. It is also the one that if it is to be any use at all simply has to be kept up to date and referred to regularly. And as soon as it falls into disorder it rapidly becomes totally useless. But it does have one really good feature. It takes time into account. Lists and inboxes can easily ignore the fact that there is only so much time available. It is a very long time since I have been anywhere near it, but in the days when I had an inbox with 2,000 or more items it became a black hole into which time vanished. ToDo lists become nightmares nearly as rapidly. Even 30 items is enough to be a major source of depressive episodes.
With a calendar you can see just how little time you have and behave accordingly. But how do you avoid cluttering up your calendar and how do you avoid spending your time rearranging items? This is how I do it. I use Google Calendar which I think has the best interface, although I am sure other formats would work to.
When I decide to do something I add it to some point in the future on my calendar with the prefix ToDo. Google Calendar lets you attach a Google Doc to the entry. I can now generate a To Do list at any time simply by doing a search on "ToDo". When I do something I simply remove the ToDo from the beginning of the description, and I can leave it on the calendar creating a record of when I did it. If I have done some work on it but not finished it, I duplicate it. Then I can use one duplicate as the entry and push the other one into the future. This has the side effect that I can tell how long a particular job has taken if I keep a careful note of start and finish times. I also colour code them. As a contractor it is important that I am spending sufficient time on billable work and also devoting a reasonable amount of time to generating new business.
So that is the system, and it seems to work. I have fallen off of it and climbed back on a couple of times, but it is way better than any other method I have tried.
photo credit: Spinstah via photopin cc
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