Dealing With Task Clutter

Quote of the Week

“Clutter causes stress, and stress is one of the main barriers of productivity.” — Charisse Ward

Task Overwhelm

One of the things that I have noticed is that the more tasks I have on my task list, the less likely I am to do any of them. It doesn’t have to be dozens of items, either. It can simply be a list of ten things. Once I see it, my brain shuts off and I am much more likely to go do something like read or sleep or stare out the window.

Maintenance Tasks

So I took a look at my task list. Most days it was filled up with tasks that are what I call maintenance tasks…repeating tasks that are not necessarily critical unless they don’t get done often enough.

There are a lot of things that fall into this category, and they overwhelm all the other stuff.

In fact there are weeks when all I do is the maintenance tasks, and everything that is truly important gets lost.

Contexts…But Not

David Allen in Getting Things Done* talked about contexts as a way to limit the number of things you’re looking at. If you are at work, you don’t see the tasks for home. It’s a great concept. But when your contexts include things that are with you all the time, like with a smart phone, tablet or pc, contexts lose their value.

So there needs to be another method.

Calling Alistair…

Right now I am working with a modified version of the Alastair method. I have a paper list of all my maintenance tasks for the week, and then I use a highlighter to mark when the tasks should be done.
The benefit of this is that it is removing the maintenance tasks from my day to day list. This keeps me from being overwhelmed, but also from moving tasks forward too many times.

It’s working for me right now, and I’ve been doing this for almost 2 months. I feel like I can actually see the important stuff now that the urgent stuff is out of the way.