For years now I’ve hesitated to share suggestions on how to organise tasks and manage time. This probably sounds nuts, given the business I’m in. But it’s so idiosyncratic, I say to myself. What works for some doesn’t work for everyone. That last thing you want to do is set someone up to fail.
The other reason I’ve hesitated to share is that I believe most task management issues won’t be solved by better task management. The challenges aren’t due to personal shortcomings; they are due to the conditions of systemic oppression and exploitation in which we live. The questions that need asking are things like: What do I accept? What do I resist? What are my true priorities? How can we change things together? Which means that conversations about task management software and the best pens for bullet journaling are never going to provide the answers.
Still, I manage my time. I organise my tasks. And I’m really good at it. I’ve spent fifteen years developing a system that works, and I might as well share it. Even if it doesn’t work perfectly for you, it can give you a place to start. And sometimes, that’s all we need.
My system uses three to-do lists: global, weekly, and daily. It is designed for people who have a lot — a LOT — to do, and who work mainly on their own, with limited areas of collaboration.
Global To-Do List
This is your master list. Every task that needs writing down gets written down here. If you prefer pen & paper, a notebook might work for this, but you probably have too much going on for that. Software is usually a better bet, and there are lots of options. My preferred software is Things (Mac only, I’m afraid), but there are plenty of others. What you want is a place to note everything that needs doing or might need doing someday, with software that lets you nest the tasks in hierarchies of lists.
Weekly To-Do List
Once a week, consult your global to-do list and whatever bits of paper you have floating around your desk / voicenotes recorded on your phone / post-its stuck to your nose and make a list of everything you intend to accomplish in the week ahead. This is best done with a clear awareness of what your week ahead looks like! Making a Sunday evening ritual of this is one way to go about it. In productivity geek terms, you are consulting your open (global) to-do list and drawing up a closed (weekly) to-do list.
You might organise this weekly to-do list into a few categories: ex. Writing, Teaching, Life Admin, etc. EVERYTHING YOU CHOOSE TO DO IN A WEEK COUNTS. It’s up to you if you create a category for Self-Care or not. I don’t, because I choose not to have things like yoga and meditation become tasks to tick off a list — I want a different quality of awareness around them — but you certainly could if it helps you to remember that they are valid and legitimate priorities too.
Daily To-Do List
Each morning, choose the items from the weekly to-do list that you will address today. You can be creative about this. For example, there might be a task that can be accomplished in a single go (eg Pay holiday cottage deposit), or there might be one that is a piece of an ongoing whole (eg Read article for 30 min). You’ll likely also have to move over some tasks from the day before, and the bullet journaling task shorthand (now behind a paywall on the official site so you may need to look elsewhere, or I can show you) is brilliant for this! I strongly recommend that you not divy out tasks for each day at the start of the week, but take it a day at a time instead. Among other things, this facilitates experimentation with what it’s like to work with your energy rather than against it.
I realise as I write this up how much more I could say about every bit of it, so consider this an invitation for further conversation, whether with the group as a whole or in a one-to-one with me. My system is not 100% perfect, and it requires commitment to work over the long-term. The truth is that articulating and prioritising tasks — ie how we spend the time that, in the aggregate, is our life — is a practice: an opportunity to build awareness of what really matters and to put it, one task at a time, into action.