I’m sufficiently enamored with SF as to want a nicer book. I have so many steno books, I wish I liked it. The lines are so big though, I write really crappy and fast. That probably won’t change, but…you know me, any excuse for more office supplies. (Plus I threw a little business at Borders.)
Before I move everything over en masse, I want to do some reflecting on what I’ve liked, what I haven’t, what I’ve changed, and what I’d like to change.
1) I’m thinking that is some benefit to beginning the tasks with something similar to a context. I just put a couple songs on the list that I’d like to pick-up from iTunes. So, I prefaced them with iTunes. I guess I could have also used computer. I’m thinking also of the things I want to order online. These are all things I can do while sitting at the computer. It makes sense to allow them to jump out at me together. Call is the other biggie. As I look at my old list, I’ll see if there are other likely candidates.
-Computer
-Call
-Tickler (or T w/circle around it) to show I’ve got something in my tickler about it)
Contexts I’ve got currently in OF:
-Personal
-Calls
-Computer
-Admin
-Indoors
-Outdoors
-School
-Maintenance: Weekly
-Maintenance: Zone
-(various people)
-Waiting
-Reference
-Not now (new, I instituted it for things dismissed from SF)
2) Slow. Dooowwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn.
Make it at least a little prettier, huh?
3) Today, I started going through and putting stars by ones I thought I could knock off when scanning. After I did it, I regretted it. What if I didn’t get to them. Forever starred. I tried that before with home-made, orange, post-it triangles. That worked well too. They’re a pain to move and keep corralled. I’m thinking pencil is a good tool of choice for that. I’ll leave enough room on my page to allow for that. (Maybe one column per page? )
4) Love, love, love the tip from Mark about the vertical lines connecting completed tasks.
5) When I posted at Mark’s in the ‘C2 is clogging my system’ thread, (must have been right when I wrote the post on 2/17 here) I wrote:
I definitely feel like C2 is halting me this morning. It’s my own fault. But I’d love advice as to what I could have/should have done differently.
I’m on vacation (at home) this week trying to get stuff done around the house. I’ve made great strides cleaning, organizing etc. What I’ve not made progress on is some more business-y type phone calls that I need to get done (insurance, investments, etc.) Last night I realized that with only two more ‘work days’ this week, I best get on those, so I made the three tasks in question urgent. They, and several other things, are now in C2 of my current page.
All morning I’ve been sort of paralyzed because it’s been too early to make these phone calls. I’ve done some of the other C2 things, but still others have to wait for something else to fall in line. I recall Mark’s response to someone who’d left work and couldn’t do something in C2 because they were no longer in the right place. I feel that’s true (in one form or the other) of several things in C2 right now.
Was I wrong to move them to C2?
I feel like I need something in-between promoting something to urgent and leaving it down on page 4 or 5. Maybe this still stems from my first couple days when I was stuck on one page. Maybe I’d have gotten to these things today and not felt paralyzed by them if I’d left them in their original positions. It’s ironic that by pulling them all up to urgent I’ve, once again, clogged up my flow and I’m stuck like I was those first couple days.
Thoughts?
And got back from Mark:
Malisa:
Basically I only regard something as “urgent” if I need or want to do it within the time I’m on the current page.
I don’t put things in Column 2 just because I need to do them today.
So what I would have done with those phone calls was only enter them in Col 2 when it was time to do them.
And from Alan:
I think there’s a misuse here.
If it’s to go in C2, it’s either urgent or unfinished, but with respect to these nuances:
urgent: it should be worked on in the next hour because later than that would be bad. Further, you are now able to work on it.
Unfinished: you define for each task what part needs to be accomplished before you consider yourself done-for-now. That definition is what you write in C2. Until you reach that point, you do some and reenter in the next column 2. If you *can* no longer work the item at present, you are,de facto, done-for-now. To C1 it goes.
Now if something was stuck and set aside, and if (eg) an email comes to unstuck it, and it’s urgent, use the urgency rule, and the trigger of the email to reinstate it.
It’s important to keep the above terms narrowly defined to keep the flow.
When I’d initially printed out what Mark had written, it said that C2 tasks had to be actioned before moving on. (completed?). I took it to mean completed. It seemed that’s what others had inferred to. Yesterday, someone posted this:
I would have thought reading War & Peace was a recurring task – or at least that’s how I would have interpreted the rules. If you put it in Column 2, and the rules say that you can’t leave the page until you have completed all tasks in Column 2, that means you are stuck on one page until you finish the whole book. Or did you break it down and put, say, read one chapter in Column 2? Likewise the review of the systems – did you put down a single review at a time in Column 2?
Mark wrote (in response to someone saying where he might have gone off track):
<< It's possible that John was confused by this sentence... >>
I’ve amended the rules throughout to use “worked on” instead of “done”, “actioned”, “completed”, etc.
You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is when writing these rules to anticipate all areas of misunderstanding!
Okay…
…so my thoughts on being more specific with writing my tasks so that they’re ‘finishable’ were wrong/not necessary. And as a means of confirmation, Mark responded to someone:
<< I am allowed to write huge, vague, formless goals on my list >>
Yes, it can be amazing how creative one becomes when one of these huge, vague, formless goals is being worked on many times a day because it’s in Column 2.
Hmmm.
lists