Tools for Thought

While I was in the middle of reordering, revising and adding sections to the Pattern Language for Productivity series for a downloadable version, one of my more saintly readers, D.L. Fuller, preempted me and sent in PDF and RTF versions, which I’m making available now.
I still see errors and omissions in the series, so I’m […]

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Before we can manage our options, we need to have options. By default, the brain organizes learned experience into stable perceptual frameworks and common response patterns. It needs to do this. We wouldn’t want to consider every possible way of crossing the street; we just look both ways and walk if we see no coming […]

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Our priorities are based on our time frames. When we eat an ice cream, we’ve made short-term enjoyment a priority over long-term health and vitality. When we postpone dinner with family and stay late at the office to complete a project, we’re making another priority choice. These may or may not be the right priorities, […]

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Many activities can be batched, not just repetitive ones. We have context lists that group like activities by the location or resource required — an @Computer list for tasks requiring a computer, an @Home list for tasks that can only be done at home, and so on. We can batch the processing of paperwork and […]

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A complete review of projects and next actions held once per week is critical for keeping your tasks management system trustworthy, preventing “stuff” (unprocessed agreements, intentions, information) from piling up in mind to the point of distraction. Weekly reviews can be empowering, but they can be too empowering. From the repose of the weekly review, […]

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A common problem with task management systems is the length of time that entries remain unexamined. Action lists contain items that no longer reflect current reality. Things that seemed like good ideas at the time they were written down are no longer priorities, no longer practical, or simply no longer interesting.
Hard landscape items on calendars […]

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When we’re undecided on whether or not to commit to a project, one option is to shelve the project on a Someday/Maybe list. But sometimes indecision stems from insufficient information. We need to get enough data to make sure that deciding not to do something is a proactive choice, made from reason or informed intuition, […]

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The flip side of managing commitments is managing options. There’s a subtle but fundamental difference between choosing not to act on an option and not choosing to act on it. The former is proactive triage, the latter is indecision. Some things are not worth doing now, but possibly later. Some things, though interesting, are not […]

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To bring a project to closure, we need not only to keep track of our own actions, but those of others. Legacy To Do lists are not designed to track external dependencies. We need a language to identify all components of a project, not just the proactive.
Whenever a project requires information or a delegated action […]

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Repetitive tasks are usually not high-priority ones, but they still need to be done. The fact that they need to be done doesn’t mean they need to be done the moment they have your attention. Let them accumulate, handling them at optimally infrequent intervals, between which you spend the bulk of your time focusing on […]

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