Accomplishing-more-with-less SCU

Jim's question

After getting back to my office today, I realized that there was a subject that I feel is very important that I don't think that we covered: Extended To-Do lists. While we discussed putting a few items in our Journal To Do list each day and dealing with that, I have an electronic list with 163 items on it right now. Coordinating that list with the journal list and getting to the important stuff on a list full of "noise" items is really difficult.

Do you have any suggestions in this area.

Incidentally, I maintain this list in a MS Access database application that I built myself. Each task is organized by project, sub-project, priority, start date and deadline. However, the deadlines are sometimes arbitrary or just wishful thinking and if an item is not completed by the deadline, the deadline shows up in red.

Again, thanks for the class, the techniques were very helpful and I am going home now with my Inbox empty and my urgent emails handled.

Perre's note

This is an idea on how to deal with the "extended to-do list":

• I would review the extended to-do list on a weekly basis (beginning of week or end of week, let us say end of week for now)
• Important items in the extended to-do list which you think should be accomplishing during the following week, should be scheduled on calendar (i.e. putting on the side some time slots to get these items done)
• Then when you review the extended to-do list the end of the following week, you can cross off items that were done, and schedule new items for the week after.

In terms of the To-do items on the journal (and I think you meant the "what I intend to accomplish today" items), these are meant to be the result of your morning reflection, and just as an extra checks-and-blances, to make sure that you are stopping and capturing your intuitive thoughts, and taking into account any changes that took place recently.

In terms of the To-do items on the "Add to to-do list" page on the journal (Theresa suggested that you meant this kinds of items), this would be processed during the end-of-day reconciliation, and preferrably as many of these items should be taken care of during the end-of-day reconciliation, but those items who don't get taken care of, then they would go into the "extended to-do list".

If anyone has additional ideas, please go ahead and add your thoughts.

-- PierreKhawand - 14 Feb 2008

Theresa's note

In response to Pierre's comments on Jim's journal "to-do list", I was assuming Jim meant the on-going list we generate throughout the day to deal with those pesky mind-wonderings, not the daily list of items we intend to accomplish.

Pierre, didn't you mention that there might be a better format for our "extended to-do list"? Something about a MS Word document with navagation or links?

Okay, now I'm going to backtrack and take the TWiki tutorial!

Pierre's additional note to Theresa/Jim

In response to Theresa's note above, I appended some additional info regarding the "to-do" list handling, in my original response to Jim above.

I also attached below the catch-all to-do list template which includes the clickable table of content and categories.

And congratulations Theresa for figuring out the TWiki tutorial

-- TheresaConefrey - 14 Feb 2008