How To Effectively Use A Task Manager.

When someone is first introduced to a task manager, there is often a sense that all their prayers have been answered. From the moment they install their new task manager on their devices, they can offload all the things they are trying to remember in their heads into an external source that becomes their “second brain”.

It can be liberating and exciting, and as you offload all those tasks and little reminders into your new task manager, it feels like a weight of expectation has been removed from your shoulders.

Yet, over a few days, the expectation of freedom your task manager gave you begins to crumble. You begin to notice you are adding a lot more tasks than you are completing, and the area where your lists (folders or projects) are kept is starting to look overwhelming.

You also notice you are still forgetting things because you haven’t entirely developed the habit of collecting everything. Thus, you begin a state of flux, collecting around 75% of your commitments and keeping the remaining 25% in your head.

There is a learning process whenever we learn something new or build new habits. We don’t read a textbook, and all the information is miraculously stored in our heads. Humans don’t work that way. There are incredibly complicated processes in play when we learn — so complex that even the smartest Neuroscientists have not yet figured it out completely.

One thing we do know is to learn something, and to master it takes time. There’s a lot of repetition involved and many mistakes to be made. That’s the learning process, and it’s perfectly fine. Indeed, the more mistakes you make, the better you will learn. Hence, the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up because you are still making mistakes. Becoming frustrated with yourself because you haven’t got something working exactly how you want it will stop you from mastering whatever it is you want to learn.

How do we get a task manager working?

The first thing to do is to familiarise yourself with your new task manager. Go through the menus and settings. Learn everything you can do with your new task manager.

Now, a typical task manager is composed of three areas:

There’s the collecting area. This consists of an inbox of some sort. This is where you collect all your new tasks and reminders. Learning to get stuff into your inbox is the second thing you need to do. If you are not collecting, there will be nothing to see.

Collecting needs to become a habit. No matter where you are, you must be able to collect new tasks. Ideally, you want to set up your phone so that there is very little resistance to adding a task. Being able to use voice assistance to collect tasks with Alexa or Siri is a huge bonus.

The second area is your tasks for today. This is the list of tasks you have dated for today. This is where the digital task manager outperforms the humble to-do list because as long as you have added a date to a task, the task will automatically appear in your today list when it is due.

In a to-do list written on paper, you have to manually move tasks to show up for today, or you will end up with a massive list of things to do that become impossibly overwhelming. Your task manager takes care of this by only showing you tasks that have today’s date in your list of tasks for today.

And finally, there is your projects, lists, or folders. This is where you hold tasks that are related to one another in some way. These lists are holding pens for tasks that are yet to be done (or you haven’t yet decided when you will do them).

Typically, these folders would be organised by your projects, areas of life such as work and personal, or by context (if you follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done principles).

How you organise this area is entirely up to you. Whatever way you organise this area, it essentially doesn’t matter. These are simply holding pens anyway. The only consideration you will need here is how easy it will be to add your collected tasks, and when you do the weekly planning, it makes sense to you.

Of these three areas, the most critical area is your today list. Once the day gets underway, today is the only list that matters — aside from your inbox, where you are collecting new inputs.

One mistake I see plenty of people making is working from their folders or projects list. This is the planning area, and if you are working from this area, you are ignoring the business end of your task manager — the today list. This tells me a person has not done a weekly planning session, and they don’t ‘trust’ their task manager.

Trusting your task manager.

For your task manager to work, you need to trust it. The only way to trust it is to ensure you are collecting everything into your inbox, processing it every 24 hours or so, and consistently doing a weekly planning session.

The weekly planning session is where you go into your holding pens (folders/projects) and ensure the tasks are still relevant and have the correct dates. Resist the temptation to add a random date to everything. The date you add to your task needs to be the date you plan to do the task.

If you begin adding random dates to everything, you will overwhelm your today list. It also becomes meaningless because the tasks showing up for today will not necessarily be tasks you need to do today, and you will be wasting valuable time rescheduling tasks to another random date.

Swamping your today list with tasks that do not need doing today is the number one reason so many people fail at getting a task manager working effectively. Once your today list becomes swamped, you stop collecting tasks, and you won’t trust your system.

If you want your task manager to work effectively for you, you must keep it simple and apply some basic rules to its use:

• Collect everything into your inbox and clear/process your inbox every 24 hours or so.

• Focus your attention on your list of tasks for today throughout the day. Set yourself the goal of clearing your today list each day (even though you are unlikely to do this every day)

• Be consistent with your weekly planning and only add dates to tasks for the days you know you will be able to do them.

If you respect these simple rules; collect everything, work from your today list and use your folders/lists as holding pens, you will quickly find you trust your system, it works for you, and you will soon find yourself feeling less stressed and overwhelmed.

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