August 27, 2011
There’s nothing worse than an overloaded task list. It makes it unusable. The MYN system offers a lot of solutions to that. But one main reason people are putting too many tasks there is because they’re putting systematic tasks in their list. What do I mean by that? If you have an invoice processing job and you process 50 invoices a day, do not put all 50 invoices in your task list. Use a separate list of invoices and then put one entry in in your task list that says Complete Invoices.
Same if you are say a sales person who is making cold calls. If you are required to make 10 calls today, don’t list each one individually on the Critical Now list; instead make one entry and keep the 10 items in a separate list.
The point is that the purpose of your MYN task list is to give you a way to organize loose and scattered to-dos, allowing you to make sense of a chaotic work life. It allows you to clearly identify the urgency of those scattered items. The MYN list does not take the place of other tools you may use for systematic work processing. Any repetitive tasks which are part of a well-defined process you do routinely—keep those separate, in their own lists or systems.
Michael
In the MyLifeOrganized application, you can use an heirarchy to handle that kind of stuff. Better than outlook, toodledo or any mindmapping app I have tried.
I totally agree that an overloaded task list is next to useless. I have yet to see a good system, though, for my situation. I am a solo lawyer with approximately 100 active cases. Each case has at least one task that needs to be done. Putting that much in a task list though, makes it useless because my brain just cannot accurately prioritize that many items.
Kudos! What a neat way of tihnking about it.