Hi MLO Community!
I hope this message finds you well. Today, I'd like to share an insight that recently crystallized for me, something that has been on my mind and challenging me for quite some time. I believe I've finally managed to articulate a fundamental aspect of personal task management that we could all benefit from discussing.
At its core, managing personal tasks is fundamentally about managing our most precious resources: time (and energy, health and money too...). However, for the purposes of this discussion, let's focus on time management.
Many of us use tools like MyLifeOrganized (MLO) to manage our tasks. MLO, for example, offers an impressive array of features that enable the creation and management of a sophisticated system for tracking tasks, to-do items, and even entire projects. It allows for the specification of task duration, priority, urgency, and supports an almost limitless hierarchy of task categorization.
Despite these capabilities, a crucial question arises: what real value do these features offer if they don't simplify critical aspects of time management? Specifically:
Time Allocation Across Life's Roles and Areas: How can we easily visualize and adjust our time distribution across different areas of our lives, roles, projects, or goals to ensure it aligns with our current ambitions and priorities?
Planning Our Time Effectively: How can we plan our days, weeks, and months in a way that is realistic and flexible, ensuring that we don't overload ourselves with more tasks than we can handle in the available time?
Adherence to Planned Time: What mechanisms do we have to track our actual time spent on tasks compared to our plans, enabling a thorough plan vs. action analysis?
While there are workarounds and methods to achieve some of these objectives within existing applications, they often feel like makeshift solutions rather than integrated, purpose-built features.
I believe there's an opportunity for us to discuss and perhaps envision enhancements or new tools that more directly address these fundamental aspects of personal task management. How can we better integrate time management into our task management applications to truly support our goals and improve our productivity and satisfaction?
I'm eager to hear your thoughts and any experiences you might share on this topic. Together, we can explore ways to make our task management tools work even harder for us.
Patricio.