Humor me for a bit by engaging in this short exercise:
1. List all of your projects. Define a “project” as something most people would define it as, not the way David Allen would define it. If you’re confused, don’t worry, just go with your gut for now; step 4 will take care of things. I have 6 projects; in semi-cryptic shorthand: research, business1, business2, thesis, motorcycle, jobs, sidejob.
2. Put a line through occasional fun things. For me, “motorcycle” gets nixed here.
3. Put a line through things you can automate. For me “thesis” gets nixed here. In my field, we publish small papers along the way and assembling them into a thesis is easily automate-able work. For others this may not be the case.
4.Put a line through anything requiring less than 5 tasks to complete. This is definitely distinct from a lot of time management web-apps and GTD. Let’s be honest, “get an oil change” is not a project for normal people. Yes, technically it takes more than 1 task to complete, but get real, it doesn’t need a “project folder”, it doesn’t need it’s own list, it simply just needs to get done. Call the place to arrange a time and take your car there. It’s not that hard. I didn’t list any “projects” like this in my original list so nothing gets nixed here.
How many projects do you have left?
I have 5 left.
Now if I were to list immediate actionable tasks for each of these 5 projects, I’d come up with an average of 3-5, and that’s being generous. Often a project simply has one obvious next action. Say I have 4 tasks for each of these projects, that gives me 20 tasks.
Add another 5 miscellanous tasks that aren’t associated with projects (this is where “call the oil change place” comes in).
That’s 25 tasks. (My real task number is even lower, keep reading)
What Does this Mean?
Elaborate task management systems are probably unnecessary for you. And, as I’ve mentioned before, GTD style context sorted lists are most certainly overkill. Remember, even in the book GTD itself, David Allen says explicitly, “If you have only twenty or thirty of these [next actions], it may be fine to keep them all on one list…For most of us, however, the number is more likely to be fifty to 150″.
150?! Immediately actionable items that need to be tracked? Get out.
Also unnecessary when you only have 20-30 tasks are all those time-management webapps that sort tasks by project, context, labels, folders, display this and that mode, and what not.
All it takes with 20-30 tasks is one list, and, for good measure, planning your day.
What if you got way more than 25-30 tasks when you did this?
If you have more than 5 real projects as a grad student, you are either a) fooling yourself b) way overcommitted and thus should not be reading blogs right now c) likely not making progress on your most important project at the pace you’d like (for me, this is “research”). Cal Newport had a great post about Einstein focusing on one or two projects at a time. Einstein folks, Einstein.
Another possibility is that you are listing tiny things as “projects” and giving them way too much weight in your life (see the oil change example above).
If you have more than 3-5 immediate next actions per project, something is definitely askew, or you’re doing the completely overkill thing of listing “dependencies”, tasks that are dependent on other tasks being completed. That, by the way, is a huge waste of time, cause how often is it not obvious what the next action is after you finish doing what you’re doing right now?
So if no elaborate time-management system, then how should I track these tasks?
In a list somewhere. One list. And then don’t worry about it. If you want some important ones to stand out, put a star buy it (I do this all the time), or circle it or something.
What my list looks like:
I’ve been keeping such lists, updated daily in a single text file since February. Every day I just copy yesterday’s list, paste it at the top, delete stuff I did, add some new stuff, and proceed with my day. This has happened almost every day, minus weekends (sometimes), vacations, conferences, or other special scenarios. In addition, by keeping a real simple text file like this I can impromptu brainstorm on stuff when I want, or do a more zoomed out “goals for the week” list wherever I want (note below you see some really long lines or indented lists).
Here’s a really zoomed out snapshot of what it looks like:
My average number of tasks:
While writing this post I was curious how many tasks I had per day on this list. I averaged over this past month cause it’s too boring to go back further.
My daily average number of tasks over the past month was 10.45454545.
Way less than 25.
That’s impossible, certainly you have more, what about errands and things?
For the most part, I find keeping track of little personal crap on my todo list that contains work related tasks distracting and unnecessary. When I need to make sure to do some personal item, it goes on the list, (just like we added that extra 5 items earlier to our final list to get 25 total tasks). But by and large, personal things just get done without tracking. When I need to mail the census, I just mail the census, I don’t write it down somewhere first.
I find no problem with this because most little personal things don’t weigh on my mind at all, and the few that do go on the list. In addition, a lot of things come up ad hoc when I’m in the flow of working, as is the case for most everyone. Why interrupt that flow by writing stuff down, or worse yet, moving to the next item when there is no urgent need to?
Such has been my todo list experience for the past month: completely maintenance free. One list, mostly the important stuff, no sorting, no filtering, no contexts, no headache.
