For years I have struggled with planning and goals, but this year I am determined to make it work and get myself going. I am going to outline my process so I can look back on it and better refine during the year if needed.
The first thing I am doing is using a great little iOS app called Timeful.
This little app starts my day off right and helps to find times within your days for priorities that you define and then keeps pestering you to go and schedule them. It ties into my calendar on Google and updates the calendar there.
Once I have the times mapped out I begin my day by spending those 15 minutes that are allocated to a simple document that I have created with Pages that outlines Year, Month, Week, and then finally Day. It is very important to make the actionable and focused. I don’t just say that these will be done, but instead I make them they will be done by X day or X time. this helps me put timelines in place for them.
Next I place these important goals into Todo on my mac. The great thing is that there is also an iPhone/iPad App. I chose to sync the lists using Dropbox, but Todo also has there own sync service.
The Mac app is very nice looking and I find it highly functional and one of the best GTD interfaces out there. This is a redesign that they underwent last year and it clearly shows they took some time to get it right.
You will notice in this photo I have some codes which are PB and PT. I have been grouping a bunch of small tasks into these “Blocks”. My codes are Personal Time and Productivity Block. I place a day as I tend to reuse the lists and I have created them as projects in the program. The nice thing is you can take any of these and drag them into Calendar which I am using on my Mac.
I am creating daily schedules at this point that have all tasks to complete for the day. Here is the part that I am still trying to figure out, but in essence I am budgeting my time. I need to do a better job of scheduling some breaks and will be working on that in the coming weeks.
I also have a couple of other tools that will help with my scheduling, but that is for next time. Please let me know if you have any question by emailing me. I also know this is a work in progress and hope to better refine it over the next month.
Sounds interesting! And at work they have just started using something called Trello for planning. We MUST find technology tools that give us back the time we “let” technology “steal” from us! I hope we can talk soon my friend – I look forward to our partnership and friendship;-) (The trouble a guy like me riding the Tide of the Daily News has is — it’s really not something schedule-able;-/