27 June 2007

To Do or Not To Do....

OK... so Monday night, hubby and I had a look at our Big List O' Unfinished Projects. It's still big, and that's a problem because we got to a point where we looked at it and glazed over. So we tried another attack. Inspired by a blog post at Agile Development, we used a quadrant grid with axes of importance (high/low) and difficulty (easy/hard) we tossed each project into the appropriate quarter. What we found were 10 no-brainers, 10 difficult but important, and the ... chaff. Though mostly the chaff was still important, just less likely to make money. Anyway, this is what our table looked like:

prioritizing


Incidentally, I crossed one item off already; one of the "No Brainers" (easy/important) that I had just been ignoring.

Meanwhile, I read an interesting piece at LifeHacker on separating your to-dos from your email (you know, those Action items that you forget to follow up? You never forget? Well, congrats on being the only perfect person I know.) Me, I forget about half of them whether I add a star, a flag, or even a reminder -- especially since you can "snooze" reminders infinitely.

Of course I have also found keeping a little to-do list on the front of my Google Homepage iGoogle home tab is helpful, as long as I keep it to under 10 items (more than that and I start to ignore it).

2 comments:

Star said...

I am a list maker. I find I accomplish much more if I have a list and can cross things off when done. I like that part. I once read that you should do all the little things right away, rather than putting them off simce they are not so important. That way they don't pile up. If you leave them til after you do the big stuff they are less likely to get done. I found it to be sound advice, when I actually follow it.

Shawn DeWolfe said...

My plan is to still do everything on the to-do list, but some stuff will wait longer.