In planning tasks take note of two different ways of placing items on a waiting list: stacking or queuing them.
We are all familiar with both. We go to the grocery store, and wait in a line (queue) to pay for our items. We have a pile of paper work on our desk, when we get something new we place it on top.
The order of clearing stacks and queues are opposite: in a queue it is first in, first out. In a stack it is first in, last out. In queues things flow through, in stacks they pile up and we have to dig down to the bottom.
So here is the important thing - our brains tend to act as stacks: the latest idea we have goes on top of prior things. This can be quite bad, since our memories are faulty it is similar to having a bunch of "to do" notes in a messy pile with disappearing ink on them. If we stack too much on there, by the time we dig back down the note is useless to us. Opportunity lost. Our brains stack projects and ideas that are written in disappearing ink leading to loss opportunities - we must find tools to help prevent loss of good ideas, losing focus and dropping what should be high priority tasks, and act on what is important now while saving good projects to think about for the future.
The classic approach to confronting this reality is to make a schedule in a calendar, ensuring we queue the important things and get them done. This is helpful. But how about all those "neat" ideas, stuff we want to do, projects to stew on? We need to store those, get them out of our mind so we don't forget them, and so we don't waste resources thinking about them without progressing them forward. You can have an "idea box", a note book, etc. to collect them - but this is far from ideal, now you have two separate processes to help manage your ideas.
I have found a nice tool that seems to take our brains "stack and lose" problem into account in a clean and easy to use manner: "things". The idea is simple: sticky notes, that can be tagged (for searching and ordering), placed in project folders, and have "to do on/by" stamps on them. Basically you take what your brain normally does - a bunch of ideas & thoughts - and you digitally capture them, allowing the computer to sort, slice, dice, put into a time sequence, store once done for documentation, rank by priority, etc. etc. Things is your brain, without the loss of persistence.
I'm currently using the free trial, and I am loving it. I have always had issues with retaining ideas and scheduling actions. Things seems to help, and is much more natural for me than just using a calendar. I get ideas and future projects put down, I get things done that need to be done. I'm still getting into the swing of things, and learning to use things better as I go, but I am highly impressed. My desk is a mess, my mind is worse - Things helps.
There are two problems with things: (1) it is only for the Mac, and (2) it costs $$$. The value for the money is very high though: I will most likely be shelling out the cash, things is a valuable tool for me - I'm going to be spending my coffee/beer money on this. If you are on PC you are currently out of luck; but now that this tool is out I'm sure there will be knock offs, so look around.
Lowdown:
- View your brain's storage of ideas as a stack of notes written in disappearing ink: this is a simple analogy and will help you figure out how to best deal with this.
- Things is a tool that addresses this by digitizing ideas in notes, allowing tagging, sorting, scheduling, binning, etc. Things is natural as it follows our natural brain process, and addressed the problems we have by using the strengths of digital storage. Consider Things, or something similar, for yourself. It just might be just the thing you were looking for...
