Do You Know the Purpose of Your Task List?

With a plethora of time/task management systems, tools, and apps available it can be tough to pick the best ones. Equally challenging, it can be hard to stay clear on the objectives for each system-the tool’s intended purpose. As you add and modify tools that work for you, take a moment to get clear on what you want the tool to do for you and see if the tool is up to the task.

On the golf course, you would not use a driver 50 feet from the green. Yet often global creatives will pull a tool out of their bag without considering the main purpose of the tool.

An example.

Rhonda is a professional with ADHD who views her daily action list as something to help her do more in a given day. Unfortunately, Rhonda is becoming frustrated that she is not boosting her output,  gets to the end of the day with only half her items crossed off, and is faced with the dreaded  ‘task rollover’.

So, Rhonda does a couple of key things.

First, she recognizes that what she’s doing  is not working (recognizing when an action is not working is a major challenge for people with ADHD).

Second, she reevaluates the action list’s prime purpose. When she views it more as a choice tool – what to focus on on any given day – she gets more out of it. Now she sees it as a ‘daily intention tool’ with a focus on quality over quantity.

So as you pull tools out ask the questions: Does the tool match up with the job? Is this the best tool for the job?

A couple of other ideas:

Tools often try to do too much creating complexity. Opt for accesibility-ability to access main attributes of a tool easily.

Watch out for too much redundancy. Tools do so much that they can overlap. I had this problem with Evernote and Awesome Note.