Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Start your day right (and end it too!) with repeating tasks + subtasks
Ever get partway through your day and realize you forgot to do a quick thing in the morning? This week’s tip, shared by jjcardil, suggests a repeating task for morning—"startup"—and the end of the day—"shutdown"—where you can add subtasks for as many things as you need to do each day to get things where they need to be without forgetting anything.
I use daily startup and shutdown rituals to help organize and plan my workday. The startup ritual has 7 tasks that I used to have written in my paper planner. The shutdown ritual also has 7 tasks. I now keep these rituals in RTM and it is SO much easier to follow them on a daily basis.
I created a new list called Rituals. In that list I put a startup task and a shutdown task. I made each of these recurring daily. Then for each of these I added the list of subtasks that I want to do on a daily basis.
Now when I get to work in the morning I see in my tasks for today a workday startup task and workday shutdown task. I open the startup task and see the subtasks I need to do. Same at the end of the day!!! This works incredibly well!
Here are my tasks, yours could be anything.
Startup list
1. Review electronic schedule and update in paper planner
2. Determine DEEP hours of work possible and schedule those hours (from book Deep Work by Cal Newport)
3. Review weekly top 3 goals
4. Review weekly project focus for this week (I have multiple projects setup in RTM and I always pick 2-3 to focus on in a given week)
5. Review projects “next steps” in RTM and add to today’s daily action items if appropriate
6. Review other RTM lists and update daily action items
7. Determine daily “top 3” action items based on weekly “top 3” and collected action items
Shutdown list
1. Tally up hrs breakdown from the day (I track meeting hours, shallow work hours and deep work hours)
2. Record tally in yearly calendar (I use this so I can see how I am doing against my DEEP work hours goal)
3. Review daily top 3, if did not complete, write down why
4. Update RTM with any actions I jotted down in daily planner
5. Review RTM “Catchall” list and categorize tasks appropriately
6. Review email and clear today’s emails
7. Review tomorrow’s schedule
I also have a weekly review ritual. This approach has worked incredibly well and RTM has really helped me be consistent with my rituals.
Thanks RTM!!
Thanks for sharing this tip, jjcardil! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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