Eons ago I was turned on to the DayTimers system. It worked perfectly for me:
[ul]
[li]spend the first 10 minutes of every day planning your day, determining what is to be done, in priority[/li]
[li]create a list of tasks (fully anticipating that some tasks won't be completed or even started)[/li]
[li]Assigning Major Category priority rankings of A (highest) to D (lowest) priority. Personal tasks with P priority were always included, but lowest priority. After all, you're getting paid to work, not do your personal stuff.[/li]
[li]Assigning Minor priority within the Major Priority A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, and so on[/li]
[li]get to work, focus on priority[/li]
[li]It works best if one has a little capability of multi-tasking so that when a interruption or conflict occurs, stopping work on a task, then one can shift effort to another task on the list and return later to the paused task[/li]
[li]Next day, transfer the incomplete tasks from previous day and repeat process[/li]
[/ul]
It worked well for my personality type. Your results may vary.
It also helped me convince The Boss, after an @ss-chewing about missing deadlines, that there were too many meetings. I showed him the data, he reduced number of meetings, more work got accomplished. That was a great lesson for me. At one company I became a pariah for declining meeting invitations (which conflicted with the inefficient company culture). But when the RIF happened, they fired my entire veteran team and kept me because I got more tasks accomplished.
I have struggled to find a modern software equivalent. I'm too much of a tightwad to purchase anything expensive.
I have attempted to create custom Fields of Microsoft Outlook Task view to do the same thing. I added
ABCD... and
123... field columns to provide priority sortation of my task list. It worked...sort of. Occasionally I would goof something in the view and have to go back into the Sort function and figure out how to display properly.
NOW I simply put in the task description A0 (for initial creation & later prioritization), A1, A2, ..., B1, B2, ..., and so on. The alphabetical sortation of the task list sorts it all for me easily. This works much better for me now.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
