Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

getting things done

Back in October, when Rob and I took our road trip to Bloomington, Ind., we talked a bit about strategies for keeping ourselves from slacking off so we can get more done in a day. Inspired by that talk, I started a system of lists.

I’d kept to-do lists before, in various forms — from the uber-organized Handspring Visor I used to update religiously to the neat clusters of Post-It notes I now kept on my desk.

My new idea, loosely inspired by some things I’d read about Getting Things Done, was a series of to-do lists, the higher-priority tasks broken down by day, week and month; the lower-priority tasks (like the grocery list) broken down by topic.

Over the course of a day, I make a point of recording in my “Today” list any task that will take me more than a few minutes to complete, or which I can’t attend to right that second. I used to scribble these things down on a Post-It or try to commit them to memory. The new system works out better for me because all my active tasks (for work, home, etc.) are in one, centralized place, and I don’t have to worry about losing a Post-It or absentmindedly forgetting a task.

I get such a sense of accomplishment at checking something off my to-do list — even something relatively minor, like a set of icons — and seeing it appear, grayed-out, among a (hopefully growing) list of completed tasks.

At the end of each day, I take a look at my list for the day and, one-by-one, transfer any remaining taks to a new list for the next day. Then I look at the outstanding tasks on my lists for the current week and month and shift tasks around as needed.

My tool for the task is the Web-based Ta-Da List, a free service from 37Signals. Compared with, say, the more robust offerings of Remember the Milk, Ta-Da List has a pretty minimal featureset. There’s no way to classify tasks by topic, display multiple lists at once, attach notes to particular tasks, or assign due dates, among other things.

For me, though, the inefficiencies in the Ta-Da List system are actually an asset: Manually shifting tasks from one list to another keeps me honest about the things still on my plate — and induces a little guilt about the tasks that are perpetually shifted from day to day. (Sad as it may sound, this post about “personal productivity” has been on my to-do list for the past week, shuffled from day to day each night. But no more!)

(My one big gripe with Ta-Da List, however, is that it doesn’t have the more elegant interface refinements of the to-do lists in Basecamp: I can’t edit or delete list items from the same screen or sort tasks by dragging them around.)

It’s not a perfect system by any means, but for the past few months, it’s worked reasonably well for me — particularly during the work week. My next big challenge is to make my weekends more productive: I’m much less consistent about consulting my lists when I’m not at work, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any fewer tasks at home to address.