Rework, chop up your tasks, and the evolution of my to-do lists

On Sergey Korkin’s advice I’m now read­ing Rework and find­ing a whole lot of useful advice in it.
For exam­ple, that you should split your tasks into the small­est parts that can be done straight away and quickly.

And only a few days before that, I had watched myself work for a while and come to exactly the same recommendation. I used to think it was point­less to put tiny tasks that take lit­er­ally a couple of min­utes on my to-do list: just open­ing the note­book or the reminder app, phras­ing the task and writ­ing it down would take almost as long.
But it turns out my mind is so unsta­ble that I often forget to do even such small things, switch­ing easily to some­thing else: the phone rang, an email came in, oops, what was I doing? Probably this…

I hope, I mean I think, many people run into the same problem.

I try to solve it by writ­ing down even the small­est things and by con­stantly check­ing what to do next.

By the way, I’ll also tell you how I changed the medium for these reminders and to-do lists. I’ve been look­ing for the best way to keep to-do lists for a long time:

1. An A5 notebook. The most common way. The minuses:

• you either have to keep copy­ing tasks onto new pages, or keep look­ing through old notes for tasks that aren’t crossed out;
• you can’t regroup tasks by topic; you need a stable system of lists, oth­er­wise it’s copy, copy, copy;
• not to men­tion a dated diary: that’s prob­a­bly good for more impor­tant people with lots of meet­ings and sched­ules fixed in time.¹

2. An A4 weekly planner. That’s a big note­book where each spread holds a whole week. Completely use­less for lists of assorted tasks, better for meetings. The ideal tool for a teacher or a lawyer, I suppose :)

3. All kinds of to-do soft­ware: online ser­vices (offline pro­grams are, IMHO, a relic of the ’90s and 2000s). None has stuck so far. Maybe because I want to carry my tasks with me, or maybe I’m just not used to them; I haven’t tried that many.

4. A clip­board for A4 sheets. Write as much as you like, arrange the sheets, mark them how­ever you want, and then try to make sense of it all. Improvisation in the free-artist style, with as much organization.

5. And, atten­tion, a new turn in my pro­duc­tivist evo­lu­tion: a to-do list in a text doc­u­ment in Google Docs.

Ha! One sheet, all the lists in one place:
by date for the next three or four days,
lists by topic, by person, a shop­ping list.

Plus color-coding for tasks tied to par­tic­u­lar places (the ones to do with the office, for example).

That’s full-on kairos, plan­ning by sit­u­a­tion rather than by the clock! :) Read Gleb Arkhangelsky, the Russian time-management author.

It’s now my favorite medium. I don’t know for how long…

The only prob­lem is that I can’t edit tasks from my PDA: the mobile ver­sion of Docs doesn’t allow it yet (yes, yes, Windows Mobile with Internet Explorer. I either need to swap the device for some­thing run­ning Android, or find a suit­able Windows Mobile browser).

Still, noth­ing stops you from cross­ing tasks off on a desk­top com­puter when you get to the office or home. For me that’s not a prob­lem: I don’t often do things away from home or the office.

P.S. For anyone who wants a quick look at Rework: people post quotes and opin­ions on Twitter under the #rework tag, and there’s a short sum­mary here: Rework: Cheat Sheet.