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The Simplest, Cheapest, Most Effective Task Management Solution I've Found

This article is more than 8 years old.

Managing a To-Do List has been the bane of my existence for more years than I care to think about. As the CEO of a growing company I tried out countless Task Management Software programs along with exploring about every To-Do App that got released. Yet, no matter how many systems I tried I couldn’t seem to make one work. Usually I ended up spending so much time creating the To-Do Lists in these systems that I had no time to actually do my To-Dos! After repeated failed attempts I was beginning to have a complex - Was I really incapable of staying on top of everything that needed to get done? Finally I decided to really dig into the root cause of why I couldn’t make these systems work for me, and the things I discovered led me to implement the simplest, cheapest, most effective task management solution imaginable. Yet that solution genuinely changed my life!

Before I give this amazing solution away, let me share some of the things I discovered:

*Our lives are crazy busy and we have a million new tasks that crop up each day. If we don’t capture a task as soon as we hear about it we will likely forget it until it bites us in the behind later when it didn’t get done.

*The only way we will create a task is if it’s incredibly easy to do. If it takes too many steps to create a new To-Do Item we just won’t do it. Nine times out of ten all we need is a simple reminder to mail out a payment or sign a contract on a particular day, but the problem with most systems is the number of required fields we have to type in just to add one simple task.

*Once we create a Task List of To-Do’s the biggest problem is that we forget to go look at it! Let’s face it, these days our calendars drive our entire life. If something is on our calendar for today we see it and do it. If it is not on our calendar today than we might as well forget about it because it’s not in our face to remind us to work on it. Out of site equals out of mind. The Tasks for today have to be front and center where we can see them all day every day.

*Our lists should be segmented into one of three buckets – Items I need to do today, Items I need to do tomorrow, and Items I need to do sometime in the future. Oh, and we can’t forget our fourth and favorite bucket…the amazing and wonderful completed bucket!! Any more complexity than that and my brain has left the building…

After figuring these things out I decided to test my findings by going Old School. I took a big (and I mean full size) whiteboard on wheels and I brought it into my office. I segmented the board into three sections with vertical lines and labeled the sections Today, Tomorrow, and The Future. Next , I took cardstock paper and cut it into strips that I could write individual tasks on. I then took magnets and I placed each strip containing a task into either Today, Tomorrow, or The Future. Once I had them in their section I would move the strips in the Today section into the order of priority I wanted to get them done. I didn’t bother to prioritize the strips in Tomorrow or The Future sections because I would do that when they got to my Today section. I kept this whiteboard on wheels right in front of my desk so I was forced to stare at it all day long. When I finished a task I took it off the board, wrote the date on it, and dropped it into a box labeled complete. Then before I went home each night I would move Tomorrow’s items into Today and take items from The Future that should go into the Tomorrow section. Finally, I would take a picture of the whiteboard with my iPhone so I had my task list with me until I returned to work the next day. I realize it may sound seriously Old School, but I literally used this method successfully for several years until I sold my company.

After selling the company I found I was far more out and about which made my beloved whiteboard system not work so well because I could go for several days out of the office and my entire system was getting thrown off by not being there to move my tasks into their proper place each night. That’s when I discovered my poor man’s, hi-tech replica, for my whiteboard system.

Like many of you, I live on my iPhone, and as I had learned long ago, my calendar rules my life. I personally sync my phone calendar to my Microsoft Outlook Calendar because I live in Outlook all day long. So I decided that I would replicate my whiteboard system in my Outlook Calendar. I began setting all-day appointments in Outlook for each to-do item. I would add all of today’s tasks Today, then put tomorrow’s tasks Tomorrow and then put all The Future tasks on the day they needed to be done in the future. To prioritize my Today tasks I use a category with a color and I make all the urgent items red, and the non-urgent items orange, and then the personal items purple. Because they are all-day appointments they show up on both my iPhone Calendar and Outlook Calendar at the top of today’s appointment list. Then as I complete each item I change the category to be a category I setup called Completed (which I defaulted to the color gray to so it blends into the background once it’s done) and I leave it on that day so I have the history of when I completed it. At the end of the day I simply click and drag the all-day appointments I didn’t finish to Tomorrow so when I come in the next morning I have my new list for Today.

I have been using this new method for the last three years and it works beautifully! It may not be fancy, but it works and it’s easy and I will take that all day long!

~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blogs at www.amyreesanderson.com/blog )