I’ve Got 94 Tasks and “Relaxing” Isn’t One
I have used a to do list app to organize my tasks for a number of years. I have tried several different ones and I finally landed on one that has most of my required features. I want to write a separate post about this app in the future, but for now, I want to describe some of its useful features.
For each given task, among many other details, I can set a due date (of course) and an amount of time I believe the task will take. You can look at different “views” of your tasks (due today, due tomorrow, overdue, tasks labeled “Christmas”, etc) At the bottom of a view, there’s a nice roll-up of how many tasks are in that view and the total time to complete those tasks.
Every morning, I go into the Overdue tasks list, and update all of the overdue tasks that I didn’t get to complete to either have a due date of today or another day in the future. Every morning. For so many tasks. The company that develops this To Do app has said they are going to add a feature to batch update tasks, so hopefully in the near future I will be able to, for example, select all the Overdue tasks and set them all to due today instead of going through them one by one.
Not counting all of the tasks I already set up for myself to do TODAY, I have almost 16 hours worth of OVERDUE tasks and there are 93 that I need to move to another day! 93!
I think I need some help. I can’t decide if I need a huge chunk of time to just knock off as many tasks as I can, or if I just need to purge the whole fucking list and start over with something more manageable. Sixteen hours is a HUMONGOUS amount of time for this working mom, so I can’t imagine ever getting all of these done.
What’s the solution here? Well, that’s what I’m committed to uncovering. Before I do a full wipe out of all the tasks in a stressed fury, I think there are a few steps I can take.
- A good first step would be to get rid of all the tasks that really aren’t tasks, but more like reminders or calendar events. I have an IFTTT recipe where every time I add an event to my family Google calendar, a Reminder task is added to my list. Need to clear these out.
- Also, it’s time to GET REAL on how many tasks I can do in a day. I could start marking the tasks as Top Priority knowing that I MUST complete them, and set others to a lower priority.
- I may need a “SOMEDAY” tag that I can label those tasks with that I just don’t need to do right now but I want to keep track of. These tasks are ones that I keep moving the date on because I fear that I will forget them, but don’t need them on my current radar. I always fear I’m going to forget something, so that might help if I know the task is in there (just without a due date), and I just need a new task that says “Check your SOMEDAY” tasks. Ha.
- I need to be more diligent on actually checking my To Do list. Oftentimes I rearrange all the tasks in the morning, and then I never even review them until the next morning. I need set times (lunch, end of work, after dinner, after kids go to bed, before bed) where I check my tasks to make sure there’s nothing I can knock off. What’s the point of a to do list if I don’t check it and keep forgetting things?
Well that’s a start. Any other suggestions? Do you have a To Do list? How do you get it all done?
