My normal routine daily and weekly tasks are under control using my regular weekly diary inserts. Where I fall down (at the moment) are the non-routine and long term tasks.
I sat down the other day to try and bring together my tasks that I keep 'putting off'
I chose to keep it simple and I grabbed a plain To-Do/Notes page and started detailing those 'I will do it one day' jobs.
Small changes to your set up often bring the biggest rewards.
It’s refreshing to read such an honest reflection on productivity. Many people appear organized on the outside, but long-term or “one day” tasks are often the hardest to tackle. I like the simplicity of your approach—sometimes just writing everything down on a plain page can bring surprising clarity. Small adjustments like that really can make a big difference over time.
ReplyDeleteDuring the last days I was thinking about how to track infrequent events of different type. Some examples...
ReplyDeleteFirst: Rarely used stuff in the fridge, like Olives and Horseradish in my case. I do write the date when I open food onto the label. But with these, it can happen that I realize they turned bad exactly when I want to use them. So in addition to know when I opened the jar, I'd like to know that stuff is about to go bad, and new supply is required.
Second example: I'd like to track when to change the water filter, and see what interval is best. That's something from four to eight weeks. So in addition to the date when I should change the filter, I'd like to track the length of the intervals.
Third: ESL milk. That's "fresh" milk with longer shelf life. But once opened, it should be used up within 4 days (we have 1l units here). Currently, I use a small piece of paper to write the phase of day and date and stick it to the milk carton, like Mon 16th morning.
Fourth: Although it should be simple, I sometimes struggle with the two-day interval to empty and refill the water tannk of my espresso machine.
For some things, I use a spreadsheet with one line per day, and typed notes. But I did not come up with a simple tracking idea for all those different intervals. Maybe I should use a kitchen whiteboard where I can easily write and erase. Any other ideas? Maybe a topic for a special day on philofaxy?
Hans
I use my annual calendar for longer range things such as when I need to colour my hair again. But for things that are shorter term I use my daily pages sometimes comments in the notes section and sometimes coloured stickers. I use light coloured ones with a key that I can put start (s) and finish (f) on to help me keep track. If I don’t know the interval at first then knowing the start date allows me to build up a picture of the rhythm of life over the course of a few weeks.
DeleteI use ESL milk (we call it ‘long life’ in our house) when we are out of fresh, in 1lt cartons like you. It never goes off because I drink so much white tea it’s silly. I don’t like water, and fizzy pop isn’t good everyday, so tea and only tea it is!
I’m bad for letting pesto go mouldy in the fridge, but I’ve never written the opening date on it either.
Thanks for the annotations, Lucy. What type of annual calendar are you using?
DeleteOur local newspaper publishes an annual calendar with six monthly columns double-sided. This introduces issues across half-year boundaries, when you can't easily look back in July, because the sheet is just turned over and sticked to a cupboard door with clear tape.
For a short period, I had an annual calendar with two columns of horizontal weeks, mostly for an overview of public holidays and similar special dates. A good overview, but it was not designed for taking notes. Only circling dates was possible, because it was on a Mini format page.
In the meantime I am thinking about an "infinite" series of horizontal weeks, with maybe eight or twelve weeks history. Either single stripes of weeks that have to be moved up each week, or sheets with some kind of notches to be moved up week by week (with future weeks initially folded back).
Hans
I use a pocket sized one that I have at the front of an A5 Filofax, it fits snugly in the top three rings. I got it from MeePlus. It has 6 months on each side and folds 4 times. It has enough space to write 3 or 4 words per day with a fine pen.
DeleteI too use a simple to-do list. From this I will extract the to-dos for the day and add to a separate daily task list.
ReplyDelete