Todoist with a Notecard for the Day

Photo by: pshutterbug

As I mentioned in a long review, I've been using Todoist since August. I'll have you know that Todoist and I are still doing quite well. So well in fact that I recently started forking over $3/month for the premium membership. I'll share my thoughts on that another day.

Today, however, I want to share my experiences of halfway getting my hipster on. What? Well, basically, on top of keeping my entire list of projects, their associated next actions, and some notes on them on Todoist, I've started carrying around a 3x5 notecard for the day in my pocket with a list of the 1-3 most important tasks for the day, along with other little notes for myself (calendar items, small tasks that come up throughout the day, etc.).

Why carry a notecard for the day?

Despite being a GTD fan, I've been a firm believer in priorities for a long time. I think the priority differences between tasks should be the number one factor in deciding where to spend your time. That said, I found that having Todoist up, with all of my tasks, including a lot of low priority smaller tasks was unnecessary and frankly distracting. As I've said before, high priority tasks are often long and difficult, and when you're grinding through the trenches of these tasks, you're extremely vulnerable to distractions that take you out of the trench, which, if you finished digging, would help you tremendously in the longterm. These tasks are the research papers, the final papers, the essential background reading, the revising of a long proposal, etc. They are tasks that, if you got them and only them done today, you would go to sleep content. Conversely, they are tasks that if you leave them hanging while getting 15 other tasks done, you will still go to sleep agitated.

How many tasks should go on the notecard?

I think one, ideally, and no more than three. But it's up to you. Leo on zenhabits says he uses three. Alan Lakein in his old and famous book advocates a similar number for your A tasks. You can put more on there if you want, just don't feel disappointed when you aren't crossing them all off most of the time. Obviously if you finish one you can look back on your master list for another. In the end it really depends on the kind of work you do and how long your most important tasks usually take. I'm a graduate student in the sciences, so my most important tasks are long: many hours of experiments looking for certain data; many hours of reviewing papers and comparing to my results on a specific subject; many hours of data processing, thinking and (hopefully) concluding. So for me, dedicating an entire day to one of these tasks is useful, I usually end the day having made significant progress. Also, these thinking intensive, or equipment intensive tasks are often done much more efficiently in fewer sittings as train of thought and setup of equipment are vital, which makes stopping and re-starting really time intensive. Some days when I have shorter tasks that are the most important I use more than one.

What about all the annoying small tasks?

I do them somewhere in the afternoon energy slump. They are usually written on the bottom of my notecard, or on my "today/overdue" screen of Todoist. I try to do all of these for a given day at once. This idea of batch processing small tasks is one of the oldest tricks of the trade and if I linked to everyone that has advocated it, this post would get too long.

Why not use a full hipster PDA or moleskine?

Because I frankly don't want to carry around all that crap in my pocket. I don't carry my bag around to talks, or meetings, or class, so carrying a clipped stack of notecards or moleskine with every last thing I need to do just seems like too much. Not to mention the whole point of the notecard of the day is to focus solely on the task(s) for the day and not all the other stuff. Secondly, Todoist rocks: It's digital; it doesn't get heavy; you can add entire emails to it with the click of a button (okay, maybe a few); I could go on, but there are many things about it that I don't think I can replace with other tools.

Only the notecard?!

Lastly, I should mention that of course the notecard of the day can be used as a complement to any long list of tasks in any format, not just Todoist. Also, it can be used by itself. If you aren't a fan of long lists of all projects and associated next actions, or if you're just starting out in this productivity/organization thing, just keeping one notecard in your pocket every day and transferring remaining tasks to the next day's card is a great start.

Getting Up Early: Week 1

Photo by: scui3asteveo

So here are the results of my early rising experiments for Week 1. I want to emphasize that it's my first week, so I'm still learning! My goal is to get into work by 8:00am, including days when I go to the gym in the morning (supposed to be 2 out of the 5 workdays). To review my categories are:

1) To bed and to rise times and total hours slept.
2) Time at work.
3) 0-10 scale of how tired I was with 0 being as energetic as ever and 10 being asleep most of the day.
4) General thoughts and satisfaction with the day.

At the bottom I've listed average values for categories 1 - 3.

Here is a link to my introduction post for this experiment.

Monday

1) Asleep: 11:00 pm
Out of Bed: 6:30 am
Hours of Sleep: 7.5 hrs
2) At work: 8:25 am
3) Tired: 2/10
4) Progress not bad, 8:25 am is a lot better than 9:25 am.

Tuesday

1) Asleep: 10:30 pm
Out of Bed: 6:00 am
Hours of Sleep: 7:30 hrs
2) At work: 8:40 am (gym)
3) Tired: 8/10
4) So tired. Last hour of sleep was off an on. Got to the gym late, so then into work late.

Wednesday

1) Asleep: 10:30 pm
Out of Bed: 6:50 am
Hours of Sleep: 8:20 hrs
2) At work: 8:15 am
3) Tired: 1/10
4) Excellent, made up for yesterday.

Thursday

1) Asleep: 11:00 pm
Out of Bed: 7:00 am
Hours of Sleep: 8:00 hrs
2) At work: 8:45 am
3) Tired: 2/10
4) What a waste, I should be able to get into work an hour after waking up, but I didn't get in until almost 9am.

Friday

1) Asleep: 11:00 pm
Out of Bed: 7:15 am
Hours of sleep: 8:15 hrs.
2) At work: 9:00am
3) 4/10
4) Didn't sleep well. Stayed in bed too long. Didn't get into the gym. I'm unraveling at the end of the week!

Averages

1) Asleep: 10:48 pm

2) Out of Bed: 6:43 am

3) Hours of Sleep: 7.9

4) At Work 8:37 am

5) Tired: 3.4/10

Goals

I said I wanted to go to bed between 10 and 10:30 pm every day to get into work by 8:00 am. Clearly comparing the averages of asleep time to at work time shows if I go to bed on average at 10:15 pm, I should be able to get to work at about 8:00 am. I seem to average a solid 8 hours of sleep, as expected, and overall my tiredness is below 5, which means I have energy and focus, so that's good.

The fact that even after declaring I'm doing this experiment and keeping a log, I couldn't get in before 8:30 am on average is pretty pathetic, especially when considering I missed one gym day (which I have to make up for this weekend). 8:30 am is by no means early.

This needs to change drastically next week. The main goal for next week is to get into work by 8:00am on average. I understand that this is going to require getting into work before 8:00am on some days, but that can't be impossible.

Anyone have any early rising tips and tricks? Share your thoughts!

Getting Up Early: My experiment

Photo by: prakhar

I'm going to start a series of weekly posts that track my experiences with trying to wake up earlier on weekdays. A combination of realizing that I am more alert and energetic in the morning and this post on zenhabits made me want to try. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now (halfway successfully) but I decided this week that I should start tracking how each day went. I figure tracking my experience may help me be more diligent with going to bed early enough to make it work and could be informative to anyone thinking of trying to wake up earlier too.

Here is some background on my sleeping habits so you know where I’m starting from:

• I haven’t considered myself a morning person until maybe a few months back, when I realized really that I wasn’t a night person and figured maybe I’m getting older.
• I need about 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep a night to not feel sleepy throughout the day, although I always get up at least once during the night. These days I usually get up after about 6 or 7 hours to go to the bathroom. This makes the last hour or so questionable in terms of sleep quality.
• I’m 24.
• I’m male.
• I workout regularly and eat well.

Before this experiment (or habit change I hope) I would normally go to bed between 11 and 12 and get out of bed (distinct from waking up) at 8 or later. I would then get into work no earlier than 9am. Usually not before 9:30am. Every once in a while I would wake up between 7am and 8am. I found that when I got into to work well after 9, I would often sit down, check my email, and not actually start on that day’s important tasks until 10am. Now I’m trying to wake up by 6am on non-workout days (M, W, F) and 5:30am on workout days (T, Th). I’m hoping on both workout and non-workout days to get into work by 8am and start on my important tasks immediately. The weekends are free, but I try not to sleep in past 9am.

Here is what I’m hoping to gain from waking up early:

1. I can workout in the morning when the gym is not a zoo.

2. I’m hoping to be more efficient by shifting my work hours towards the morning, when I’m more fresh and there are fewer friends and colleagues there to talk to. I’ve found that working straight from whenever I get to work until lunchtime (sometime between 11am-12pm) is no problem regardless of how early I get in, whereas, after lunch I get distracted more easily, I’m tired, and doing work just seems more painful. This means I usually end up sitting at my desk feeling like I’m at work, but just doing unimportant tasks or browsing the internet. This is a supreme drag because you get home thinking you’ve worked hard, psychologically feeling like you’ve worked hard, but at the end of the day have little to show for it. That’s like taking the stress work gives and not getting the rewards. This realization is the straw that broke my back into starting this experiment. I also find that when I get in early (8ish) and no one is there, it somehow makes me want to quickly start working and get my A1s or MITs done (whatever you want to call it), who knows why, but I’ll take it.

I will answer the following questions towards the end of each day: 1) What time I went to sleep and got up. 2) What time I got into work and/or gym. 3) How tired I was throughout the day. 4) Did I feel it was worthwhile?

I'll try to write the answers up at the end of each day but I'll post the whole week’s responses on Friday. Wish me luck!

Simply GTD: Cell Phone Capture

SMS to email my friends, SMS to email. Months back, I posted about trying Jott. It's nice. It transcribes ridiculously well and it's pretty convenient to be able to push a speed dial button and say "do this tomorrow because it's so important" and have that show up in your inbox. But then I got in some situations, like a quiet, packed bus in the morning, where it would have been rather embarrassing to open my phone and say "Myself....at errands, tomatoes, pasta, milk" and hang up. So I just texted my email address. Then, I started texting myself more and more. I liked how I didn't even need to open the email in gmail, I could see what I typed in the "snippet" and it didn't say "Jott.com" all over it. And then I realized, why bother using services I don't need? The goal is not to get things done by adopting a million different services, buckets, tools, and gadgets. The goals is to simply get things done. My cell phone is always on me, so I can always capture things. My cell phone (shown above), isn't a fancy qwerty keyboard phone either, and I still find it easy to capture with it's T9 capabilities. And I'm not one of those high school kids that can text faster than they can type and I still find it easy. Oh the cell phone capture.

5 Healthy Foods that are Fast

Aahh, January. A time when resolutions have been made our health that we have been making for many years now....

Students have a terrible time with food because they don't have a 4 bedroom suburban house with a decked out kitchen and a stay at home spouse to cook for them, nor do they have much time for cooking. That and the whole cafeteria thing. And if you ask non-students why their eating habits have slipped, most will give you the same one word response: time.

If you're eating almost every meal in a cafeteria, I'll post some suggestions on picking good choices there later. But for now here are some healthy fast and easy meal suggestions for those that are in a time crunch but want to stay healthy.

Oatmeal

Oatmeal, an essential staple of complex carbs. The instant packets are better than McDonalds, but the reason they taste so good is because they often come loaded with sugar. Try regular oatmeal in non-fat milk. Heating it the microwave takes minutes and a little cinnamon and the amount of sugar you need (exercising self control) will do wonders. Alternatives to sugar are berries and raisins. For those that don't mind protein shakes, shredding raw oatmeal straight into a blender literally turns it into a powder, add that with to your regular shake for wonderful complex carbs.

Eggs

Eggs are a great source of protein and essential fatty acids. If you want to watch the cholesterol, just remove the yolks. Frying or scrambling eggs is pretty darn fast as well.

Milk

Non-fat, low-fat, organic, heck even whole milk (with caution). No matter your preference milk is a great source of casein protein which digests slowly. This makes it great right before bed to let your body have a slow steady source of protein for a through the night. Non-fat is great to get the protein and prevent putting on weight. You should have milk in your fridge at all times.

Sweet Potatos / Yams

Sweet potatoes are a nutritious, vitamin rich source of complex carbs, and they're sweet for crying out loud! An absolutely fantastic source of carbs and vitamins that tastes so good. They can be boiled, baked, even microwaved. Make a batch and keep them in the fridge.

Whole wheat bread

Make sure the first ingredient says "whole wheat" and not "enriched" and you're good to go for a great source of complex carbs that will complement any protein rich sandwich stuffer for a great midday meal.

These are just a start, but for many people, replacing simple carb, high fat, or sugary snacks or "breakfasts" with any of these (or better yet a combination), can do absolute wonders. Try it out!

Does your system work when you have the flu?

GTD Simplicity is so vital to the whole process working.

I was listening to a podcast on davidco and David said two things that struck me about GTD systems:

(1) "these systems needs to work when you have the flu and don't feel like it."

Ain't that the truth. I've finally stuck with a single list manager for months now: Todoist. And I see no signs of it slowing down. The number one source of agreement between me and Todoist is simplicity. I hear and read of so many people looking for a piece of software that will do all the thinking for them. Forget it. If you find it, you've also found that you apparently have no more to add to the world than a computer. In my opinion, the number one attempt at overdoing GTD is in trying to find a way to handle "task dependencies." Which leads me to quote number...

(2) "you don't wanna put call fred if fred's dead i'll call sue...you know that's overplanning... for the most part you just need to know what the kickstart is...that would be really overkill and overplanning to sit down to try to lay out a bunch of stuff that you know is going to be pretty natural and flow as you start moving on action items..."

Yes. Forget dependencies. GTD is absolutely not meant for you to stop thinking about what you have to do. It's geared towards knowledge workers for crying out loud. Perhaps the most important task for any knowledge worker is to be able to use discrimination in deciding what the next step is for moving forward on their projects. This discrimination should be what makes you irreplaceable by technology. Risking being harsh and self-righteous I think attempting task dependencies is one of the most classic novice GTD mistakes out there.

Fine, so if you really want to remember that somewhere down the line you need to do task x but it's not the immediate next action, list it somewhere in a place associated with the project and make sure your weekly review takes care of catching it when it becomes next or close to next. A good place would be a project brainstorm or project steps list distinct from your overall next actions list. If that place has to be your actions list itself, so be it. Just don't worry about dependencies, things change too fast and too much for that to be useful. In Todoist, for example, if I'm mind dumping a bunch of steps for a project I list those as items in that project's list, but my absolute next actions (or MITs if you wanna get your zen on) are ones on which I put a due date for today or overdue so that they show up on my home page. I then work off the homepage until those tasks are done or rendered unnecessary, then I go pick new absolute next actions. This step of thinking after finishing a task (unless it's trivial) is essential to keeping your project management organic enough to allow for creativity, good problem solving, and changing circumstances.

Make a Weekly Review List : Gmail it to yourself

When I first started implementing GTD and recently as an experiment, I tried to do the weekly review impromptu, off the cuff if you will. This is generally not a good idea. You should make a weekly review list because it's so goshdarn easy to make. I find the best place to put it is in an email to yourself. Often email is at the heart of folks' weekly reviews and inbox clearings, so it's a great place to put the list. Just search for "Weekly review" and get rolling.

Here is mine. Yeah, I have some odd non-traditionals on there, but if I gotta remind myself to do them somehow. What does yours look like?