May 6, 2012
I want to follow on from my previous blog post where I discussed my dislike for using reminders on tasks in Outlook. If you have not read that yet, read it first before reading this blog.
One additional alternative to using reminders on tasks is this: create what I call the MYN Reminder Task.
What’s that? It’s a high priority task that is scheduled to pop into your Critical Now section, and its sole purpose is to remind you of something coming up soon. There’s no action per se, and it simply calls your attention to something due soon—but something not due today.
This is best explained with an example. Let’s say you’ve completed your taxes a week early and that they are due to be mailed in on April 15. You have a high priority task scheduled to appear April 15 stating “Mail in Taxes Today”. But April 15 is also a busy day for you; you’ve got lots of meetings and might not be looking at your task list very often during the day. So you might set a Reminder Task to pop up on April 14 just to give you a heads up of the upcoming deadline the next day. I use a format similar to the MYN follow up tasks; the task would look like this:
“R: File Taxes Tomorrow”
Why does this work? It works because, as an MYN user, you take the Critical Now section very seriously and examine it intently many times each day. So when this pops in to that section, you give it serious thought.
With Reminder Tasks there is no action to take other than immediately deleting the task after you see it. It has served its purpose of rekindling awareness of something that may have drifted from your memory.
Note, I would not use these reminder tasks all that often; I’d only use them for relatively important deadlines.
By the way, the other way to handle this in MYN is to do what I’ve been teaching for years, and that’s to set the start date on the main task a few days ahead of its deadline so that you see it early and accomplish some work on it ahead of time. So your main task might look like this: “DUE Apr 15 Mail in completed taxes” and then put an April 13 or 14 start date on it so it appears early in the Opportunity Now section. Then move it up to the Critical Now section on April 15.
But the MYN Reminder Task is a nice alternative to this because it helps avoid you forgetting to promote the early task to the Critical Now section. It also does not imply you have any work to do ahead of the deadline; it just gives you a heads up and you move on. Since you are likely to delete a Reminder Task, it also doesn’t clog up your task list day to day.
So consider adding the MYN Reminder Task to your toolkit in the MYN system; it may save you from missing something important.
Michael
