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There’s a saying that’s been around for years: “Time waits for no one.” In the world we live in today, it seems that every time we turn our heads, our attention is drawn toward something, whether it’s advertisements, people, or something else. That’s one of the things that make this country great: It truly is the land of opportunity! However, it can get a bit overwhelming, so in this post, we would like to share with you some “steps” that you could use in daily life in order to “get the job done.” Here goes:
Plan The Night Before
This has become a regular habit of ours now, and has proven to be very helpful! Before we get in the bed, we “capture” our thoughts of what needs to be done the next day within our 2Do app (check out the app at www.2doapp.com). In essence, a “brain dump” of all the tasks that need to be completed the next day are written down. From there, we organize them into Categories. For instance, all our tasks are broken down into 3 major categories: Him (i.e. ministry tasks), Business, and Personal. Below is a “sample list” that we created for ourselves, which we would welcome you to use as well:
Him
- Ministry
Business
- Client Name #1
- Client Name #2
- Client Name #3
Personal
- Personal
- The List
- Bills
- Desires!!
As a note, the names in bold are Categories, and the bullet points are lists…. As we capture our tasks, we then can determine which lists the tasks reside. For instance, if we need to go to Walmart to pick up some blue jeans, we know that resides in the “Personal/The List” List… This normally takes about 30 minutes, as we are engaging our brain to “think through” what needs to be done. We also are thinking about the tasks in terms of their timeframe. Is it something that can be done in less than 5 minutes, or is it going to take much longer than that? If it’s a task that takes a few minutes, we simply create it as a task. However, if we know that a task will take hours to do, we create a Project or a Checklist to break down the tasks….
Here’s an example: Many of the things that we complete on a daily basis are composed of a series of tasks, not just one by itself. For instance, in a Website Creation, each day we are completing a series of tasks that help us “move forward” toward the completion of a website. So, to simplify it for ourselves, we create a Checklist within our List to break down the series of tasks that we are to complete on a given day. If the series of tasks take place during the course of several days (such as a Photography project), we create a Project List to break down the series of tasks. That way, we can assign dates and times to each task accordingly…. We also use the “Tags” feature within 2Do in order to further clarify the tasks. For example, because we do so much work in apps, we use software names (ex: Photoshop CC, Airmail, WordPress, etc.), hardware names (ex: iPhone), and more to help remind us of the “place” where we need to get the tasks done….
Hopefully that made sense! With repetition, it becomes a pattern or a habit, so the process of capturing the tasks becomes “old hat” after a while! But keep in mind, this is just the night before; everything that we set out to do the next day is outlined! All that is left is execution of the tasks….
Stay tuned ladies & gents for part 2 on Friday!….