Tips & Tricks Tuesday: A “bubbly” daily list driven by priorities
From day to day, it can be difficult to decide which tasks to work on, especially if your day can change!
This week’s tip comes from jansona, who suggests a simple system to be able to “bubble up” tasks or to—shall we say—"float them away" based on the priority.
My RTM system is GTD-inspired; I wanted a simple way to plan out my day, while avoiding time-consuming tag/list changes. The three core tenants of my system:
1. I use a unique tag for each project.
2. I use priorities to bubble tasks upward to higher levels of visibility. Hotkeys make this very fast.
• No priority: A task that will get attention, some day.
• Priority 3: A “next action” for a project. Most projects have one, occasionally two next actions.
• Priority 2: Tasks I’m dedicating time to today/soon.
• Priority 1: Tasks in progress. (includes delegated, waiting on, etc.)
3. I have my main list include all tasks due/overdue and all tasks with any priority level, and sort that by priority.
(dueBefore:tomorrow OR priority:1 OR priority:2 OR priority:3)
This means that most of my day is spent on a single list, and that list is color-coded so that I can focus on small bits at a time, greatly reducing my mental space. Tasks bubble upward through quick presses of 3, 2, and 1.
During my morning, I spend a few minutes reviewing the entire list, and promote “next actions” to priority 2 until I feel I have an appropriate amount of work for the day. I also mark due tasks as priority 2. (or postpone, etc.) Now, as I need work to do, I pick a priority 2 task, mark it as priority 1, complete it, then move on. If a task becomes stuck (waiting on an email reply, delegated to a coworker, waiting on a program to run, etc.) then I can start a second task and still remember the first. If I run out of priority 2s, I can promote more “next actions”. In this way, tasks bubble up the sorted list, and I can focus my attention on a small portion of my todo list at any time.
The only time I need to visit other lists is to move more tasks from “no priority” to a higher priority. How often I do this depends on the project; some projects I do this whenever a task is completed, others I don’t bother until my weekly review period. Moving tasks to the main list is as simple as pressing “3”. :)
Thanks for sharing your tip, jansona! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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