Simplify by reducing task clutter
Tis the season to review and reflect. January is a great time to audit your strengths and weaknesses. My real work has been falling prey to all the other distractions in my life. I have created elaborate limits to my procrastination sirens. However, they simply aren’t working, and that is because I am not happy to do the real work that I have chosen. Procrastination is easier when you don’t want to do what you have in front of you.
Focussed clutter
I fully implemented ubiquitous capture in 2008. I have been religious about collecting every thought and action. However, now I ignore my PhD tasks because they are overwhelming. I have collected every single thought into my task manager, and used that as my archive, and informal project planning solution.
The problem:
When I got reviewed my next action lists, I had over 100 available tasks. Unlike corporate projects, all of these tasks require me to complete them. None could be delegated. No wonder I didn’t want to peek into that folder. I had been using my next action list as informal project planning. Some of the items were not phrased as actions, and some were even “Perhaps, I’ll decide when I get there.”
The solution:
I created a dedicated informal planning structure. I created a mindmap for each of my main areas of responsibility. I spent the morning purging all the “maybes,” “somedays” and “I just need to remembers” into my mindmaps.
With fewer tasks in my project list, I then converted all my lists to sequential, so I will see one task at a time only. Finally, I returned to my 3 tasks habit - flagging three tasks, and completing those before moving on to choose three more.
When I am processing my inbox, I send some things directly to the mindmaps if necessary. I review these archives at each weekly review. A hidden advantage to this is I can keep my project support material, with much of my long-term thinking in my DropBox, so it is secure.
The result:
I have been getting stuff done. Most momentously, I managed to finish an excel data manipulation task that was big and I hated doing. However, it was a vital next step, so procrastination was a form of self-sabotage.
How do you manage ubiquitous capture and task clutter? How do you prevent accumulation of archive “stuff”?
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@cris: I started using Things when I realized that I was “overplanning” with iGTD. When it was clear that iGTD development was dead, I searched for a task manager that could integrate with iPhone/iTouch which meant either OmniFocus or Things. Since OmniFocus looked like the same trap (and was twice the price), I tried Things which seemed to have a different design philosophy. Been happy for the most part, but I’m still hesitant to upgrade to the iPhone/iTouch v1.3 (v1.2 still has some synching problems, but it sounds like people are having more troubles with 1.3). Too funny… I’d originally wandered on your blog some months ago when first discovering GTD and trying to implement, and now I return to it as I’m precisely experiencing what rewards describes: the latest versions of Things (desktop/iPhone) crash very badly and messed up with my sacrosanct task list! To give some context, I’m working on finishing a Ph.D. in the humanities before going to medical school starting this summer… this weirdness in my purposes imposes some tricky requirements on task management, but mostly GTD has been helping a lot. My physical setup is solid (well, at least was until my adorable wife dumped everything I hadn’t “processed” yet onto my desk, turning my entire work area into an inbox…), but I’m still procrastinating a lot through lack of a decent electronic setup. I liked Midnight Inbox quite a bit, but both the rigidity and bugginess made me drop it quite fast; I do own OmniFocus on desktop+iPhone and may return to it shortly (as in: tonight) simply because of the solidity of the software, but I’m really not a fan of the “perspectives” and the general complexity. I did try the GTD-recommended setup on a Mac from David Allen Co., i.e. Entourage, which worked for me for a very specific project but… I hate Entourage. It did reinforce though the need for the most simplistic of software for an accurate GTD setup. In this spirit, I’m trying TaskPaper and I’m liking it a lot despite its austerity, but I cannot really do without iPhone corresponding application those days, so I might have to wait a few months to get full use out of it… Thanks for the great blog!Comments
So OmniFocus really that good? How do you use it (and I realise as I’m typing that that I’ll have to go and look at your other posts!)? How do you integrate OF with OmniPlan which I’ve noticed you said you’re using to keep your thesis on track?Leave a comment
Whether you like the product design or not, Things (culturedcode) attempts to try and minimize task clutter by limiting your focus to certain tasks in three ways: 1) a powerful “today” filter implemented at the top layer that only lists tasks that you have deemed critical to do today (i.e. your top three) 2) an “areas” concept which I believe many people have been using to group tasks/projects that fall into the biggest parts of their life (i.e. research, writing, networking, personal finances, health and wellness, etc.) 3) in addition to the “today” filter, the ability to categorize a task as something that you shouldn’t even see until Friday, or as a task that you will think about again “Someday” has helped me tremendously to still ubiquitously capture, but not be drowned/distracted by all the thoughts in my head.