trendpreneur

I use Remember the Milk, but I never use it to remember the milk.

Ironic.

Here’s why. I’m not a terribly good GTD-aholic. I am forever thankful to the day I absorbed the GTD principle of “don’t worry about stuff before you have to”, i.e. I schedule in tasks in RTM for the day I have to think about them and then forget completely. It’s fantastic. However, I still keep some pretty terrible habits kicking around: one of them is what my mum used to call “the big shelf”. I think visually, so it doesn’t matter if everything’s in heaps on the floor, as long as I remember which things are in which heap, I’m fine.

This pops up in RTM as todo-list-laziness. I have one list. “Inbox”. It contains all my tasks. This is partly exacerbated by the fact I mostly use RTM via the Gmail gadget which gives me no incentive to use multiple lists. But who cares. It’s fine as it is.

Until I want to make a shopping list, and my current system totally and utterly breaks. I can’t add shopping list items as individual tasks, so to speak; my system gets overcluttered and, since I’m date-driven, I basically have to add nonsensical tasks like “milk today” “eggs today”. Even if I created them in a new list that’d still be the case, though at least then I’d have some separation from actual to-dos. The only solution I can see within RTM, specifically date-driven RTM use, is to add a “Sainsbury’s” task and add my shopping list as a note. Makes it hard to see at a glance what I’ve got to buy, hard to note down suddenly-remembered items, etc.

Good thing I’m a paper junkie, really. It just struck me as extremely amusing that I can’t use an app called Remember the Milk to do just that.

Keeping one’s communication to two sentences or less. Can you manage it?

I’ve recently seen some good ol’ time-management (and self-management) lifehacks flowing across the wires – what is it with spring that makes people want to tighten up their personal productivity? Whatever the reason for it, I thought I’d share some time management hacks that work for me, much in the same vein as The Simple Dollar did. Everyone’s different, after all.

1. Clear your head and keep it clear

This is a GTD hack. (If you haven’t read David Allen’s book, do so.)

It’s amazing how clearly you can operate when all the fluff that’s been piling up in corners of your mind has been thoroughly cleaned out and dealt with. However, more important is stopping it from piling up again. You do not need to remember everything. Get a decent calendar system – a desk diary, Moleskine, iCal, Google Calendar, whatever – and use it. [...]