Plain or sequential to-do list
In one of the previous articles I provided an overview of various to-do lists. This time I would like to concentrate on simplest to-do list: plain or sequential list of tasks.
Let’s start with a real example from the life of an AcePlanner customer. His name is Thomas and he is manager in a small company in München, Germany. In overall he usually has 6-7 appointments per week, 4-5 meetings, and some amount of none-repeating tasks, including phone calls, support tickets and urgent assignments.
He told me the story of how it can help. Managing a to-do list is a daily ritual for him. He starts a to-do list in the road to the office. No, he doesn’t take Palm or PDA, or a paper and pencil. He thinks about upcoming and non-completed tasks, ideas he is going to work today or this week. In the office he can simply write everything down to the clear page of his copy book. Additionally he has two markers: red and yellow. With the red color he marks time sensitive tasks, like meetings and appointments, and urgent or important tasks.
Completed tasks he crosses out. New tasks he adds to the list. He rewrites his paper planner usually once per 2-3 days to see if it’s accurate. You can imagine what happens with paper document after some crossing and correction. This is very important because a good-looking plan usually adds more positive emotions to our work. His new plan consists of incomplete tasks from the previous version and new tasks. Some tasks are obsolete or can be omitted, some already crossed out, thus will not be added to the new leaf. However time can turn an unimportant task to urgent one. In this case red marker is very helpful.
This method helps him to find few daily recurring tasks. And first time he tried to dedicate a separate leaf of paper for a list of recurring tasks. This was an indication what he is ready to move to an advanced to-do list or electronic planning system.
Recently he has moved the workflow to-do list to the electronic form in AcePlanner and quite happy with it. AcePlanner is a higher level of to-do list. It provides separate views for tasks and daily plan, automatically manages recurring tasks.
We will continue investigating various to-do lists in the next article.
If you have your own story of using a to-do list, please share it with the community by placing a comment.
