Process: Separating routine and other tasks

[Lisa Stroyan]

Let me preface this by saying that my brain has a hard time making routines automatic. I even have "eat breakfast" as a task, and even then sometimes it will be midmorning before I realized that I've only had coffee and that my fuzzy brain is due to crashing blood sugar :) That's one of the reasons I need MLO so much. (For the most important ones I actually have repeating reminders so that they bug me until they get done).

Therefore, I have a lot of routine tasks in my daily list. I've tried marking them differently in various ways over the years so that I can exclude them from the list, but then they get lost. On the other hand having them in the daily list makes it cluttered and overwhelming.

I know I can be alone in this. How do you all manage this dilemma?

My current solution, which works as well as any I've found, is to keep them in my daily list, denoted by starred, but order them in a separate section, manually. I have placeholder tasks to separate them. It's a bit awkward though.

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Lisa

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Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstr...@gmail.com

[Dwight]

I go at it a little different. I have daily, weekly, quarterly and annual routines. My “daily” view starts as a view of my daily routing and then I add tasks that are not part of the routine but that should be done today. This includes any task with a star, where goal=today, where context=”today” or where context=”@waiting” and start date is today or yesterday. Every day I do everything in my daily routine and as many things as I can from the weekly, monthly etc lists.

 

The challenge is to deal with tasks that seemed like I should do them today but that I am actually not going to get to. I want to avoid having them all standing around at the bottom of my list, like the chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy accusing me of procrastination. So I kill them. If I cannot get to a task today it doesn’t belong on the today list, so I will turn off the star, change the goal to weekly, or do whatever is needed to pop the task to the weekly list. Same rule for the weekly list: when I get to it I start at the top and do every task. If there’s a task I want to skip it’s either because it’s too high or because something after it is too low. I fix the importance/goals/contexts and then continue.

 

At my weekly review I check if there’s anything that has gotten pushed down into lower lists that needs to be bumped back up.

 

My goal for this is to avoid spending time repeatedly deciding to skip a task again today. It’s working pretty well.

-Dwight

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[Simon Denham]

The way I manage routines is by giving them contexts that are only open between certain hours.

 

Specifically I have 'Ritual - Morning', 'Ritual - Midday' and 'Ritual Evening', 'Morning' is open between 7 and 10, midday between 12 and 2, and evening from 4 onwards. I then give the tasks the highest priority and when i get to my desk in the morning the first few tasks are the morning routines which i tick off and get on with the day.

 

My job is fairly active so the midday and evening rituals are getting a bit vestigal but depending on your routines it should be fairly simple to group tasks by the time of day you want to do them. Also if you group all the routine contexts in an over-arching context then you can easily filter whether you want to include or exclude routine tasks in any particular view.

 

I'm curious about your current solution though, what do you mean ordered in a separate section? Do you just manally move them to a different part of the list?

 

Simon

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Lisa

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Lisa Stroyan, mailto: ...@gmail.com

[Lisa Stroyan]

Thanks; your Greek tragedy scenario is exactly what happens to me. I feel like I should get more done, and so I leave them in my daily list for the next day. I have gotten better about checking my weekly list almost every day for things that should be added. So maybe I will adopt that scheme.

Lisa Stroyan, lstr...@gmail.com

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[Nick Clark]

Would it work for you to put them in a "Daily Tasks" project? That way they'd all be together and clearly marked.
Nick

[Lisa Stroyan]

Yes, I'm using the Active Starred View and I have a separator task. Since they are daily recurring they stay roughly in the same order each day when they recur.

> I'm curious about your current solution though, what do you mean ordered in a separate section? Do you just manally move them to a different part of the list?
>  
> Simon
>  
> On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 2:45:12 PM UTC+1, Lisa S wrote:
>>
>> Let me preface this by saying that my brain has a hard time making routines automatic. I even have "eat breakfast" as a task, and even then sometimes it will be midmorning before I realized that I've only had coffee and that my fuzzy brain is due to crashing blood sugar :) That's one of the reasons I need MLO so much. (For the most important ones I actually have repeating reminders so that they bug me until they get done).
>>
>> Therefore, I have a lot of routine tasks in my daily list. I've tried marking them differently in various ways over the years so that I can exclude them from the list, but then they get lost. On the other hand having them in the daily list makes it cluttered and overwhelming.
>>
>> I know I can be alone in this. How do you all manage this dilemma?
>>
>> My current solution, which works as well as any I've found, is to keep them in my daily list, denoted by starred, but order them in a separate section, manually. I have placeholder tasks to separate them. It's a bit awkward though.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Lisa
>>
>> ________________________________
>> Lisa Stroyan, mailto: ...@gmail.com
>

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