Do you keep a personal to-do list or a daily planner of some sort?
For the past five years I have kept to-do lists and I don’t know what life would be like without them. I’m curious if anybody else regularly uses them to keep their affairs in order?
Peace,
Jack
I kept a Franklin planner “religiously” for years, and also taught my older son how to use one.
But when our company insisted we have to keep our calendard on line, I went with what we were given (was Lotus Notes, now Outlook). I download the calendar to my cell phone (and vice versa). I didn’t go with a Palm, and so far haven’t been forced to go to a Blackberry ( I really don’t want to be THAT connected to work).
I tried getting my younger son to also use a Franklin Planner - didn’t work. We tried voice recorders - he lost it. In fact, everything we’ve tried works for a short time, then once the “newness” wears off, he loose interest in doing it.
So, basically, I’m his “calendar”. I have NO idea what he’s going to do when he goes to college…
My “Calendar” is the End Pages of my A4 Week-to-View Diary, which I keep for work. I mark in which days I’m on support, which days I’m visiting which customers, which days I’m on leave, and dentist’s appointments and the like. In theory, it also exists on work’s network, on the outlook calendar. But the REAL one is in my diary.
There is also a word document on my desktop called “Things to do”. I look at it about every two weeks and clear off the stuff that’s done, which is usually most of it.
There is also a calendar on the kitchen door at home, which contains who is going where, meaning “who has the car” and also “who’s minding the kids and cats”.
Once a year, around tax preparation time, I makes vows and stuff. It lasts about a week or two.
Otherwise, no.
I use the monitorpost’emnote hardware system by 3M/Dell. Works great except one of the pups likes to eat paper especially if I have handled it.
My phone is a Palm Centro. It also keeps my calendar (which I coordinate with the one on the kitchen wall,) keeps my budget organized, lets me set alarmed reminders for myself, jot down notes, keep lists, look up words, text my children, and play Scrabble.
I also use post-it notes, and do a lot of organizing on legal pads.
I thought about switching all my to-do lists to something electronic, but even though I use the computer all the time I really like my current system of planner/to-do-list hybrids I made. Whenever I fall behind a couple days and don’t keep up with it, I feel like I’m going mad with Alzheimer’s–I can’t remember anything (sometimes I even get the days of the week mixed up)! 
I write some events on a wall calendar. I make packing lists when I go on trips. Daily lists, not so much. I tend to have a similar routine so don’t need one. Sometimes I have kept daily lists in the past, but only when I had a lot on my plate. I prefer paper over the computer for lists.
I keep ONE calendar. It’s my work calendar in Novell GroupWise. I keep a to do list when things get overwhelming. I have a few rules of thumb to keep me on top of things. My favorite rule that I learned in one of those seminars is:
Touch a piece of paper once.
What does this mean?
Once you take the time to open a memo, e mail, letter, request for information, you have to deal with it to completion right then. If you save it for later, you end up with piles of papers on your desk that “you’re saving for later.”
Of course this doesn’t work for all correspondence and all days. Emergencies do pop up and there are some things that just take time to complete but it works with 95% of paper. It’s OK to stick a bill in an envelope until bill paying day. In my book that counts as once. But it’s not OK to put a bill in a big pile of stuff to do and then sort that pile of stuff every day picking and choosing what you want to do.
Sometimes I do a thing I call excavating. I start with the top piece of paper on my desk and work my way down to the bottom til everything is nice and neat and then I dust my desk. Sometimes all that needs done with those papers is to be thrown away.
my wife uses a similar process…
She waits until she can’t find the keyboard and then she just throws it all out!
not being able to find the keyboard is usually the result of the cat corrupting the nearest FILO stack.
Being next to the keyboard it doesn’t have the same support network as some of the others.
It means that once you’ve touched it, it’s contaminated. After that, you have to use tongs.
Either that or stick your hand upside a puppet.
I know this rule as “Do it now”.
The other rule is “deal with the most loathsome jobs first”.
I’m currently doing “remote” work - I’m at one site 4 mornings a week, another 4 afternoons a week (they are across the street from each other) and at my “desk” one day a week.
So I need to pretty much have everything on THIS computer or be able to carry with me (that includes a printer, barcode scanner and base… you get the idea).
That’s why I use Outlook heavily. I have two email accounts on it - my personal work one, and a ion account that 3 of us can open. I also use the “notes” portion to keep track of things. In the ion account, I have emails flagged by red (IDS is working on) yellow (customer needs to respond) and blue (I need to do something).
I also have my personal home email (web based) - and if it’s something I really need to keep track of, will forward to my work one so it gets on Outlook.
We have a Jira site that we communicate with IDS on issues.
I can’t have a lot of actual paper - I’d never keep it straight.
Moi? I am too far fragile to do paperwork.
Kermit? KERMIT!!
I’ve been using a palm pilot of various models for years now to juggle categories of todo lists. So far it’s worked out very well for me, I like the ability to capture a thought quickly before I forget it. Several friend’s have recommended Dave Allen’s Getting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done%22%3EGetting) Things Done so I picked up the book and am going to read it next.
Sadly my Treo 650 is getting long in the tooth and is starting to fall apart and is due to be replaced. Palm still hasn’t released their long promised new OS so I’m considering getting an iPhone once I can get one without standing in line.
I have wanted for years to start being organized with to-do lists and the
like, but for the life of me, I just can’t ever get started. I carried a Palm Pilot
around for a year or two, and never created one to-do list. I don’t know how
I can get it jump-started.
I know how. First, you have to accept that you are in charge of your own life and your own circumstances. The most basic choice you have is the choice to live or to die–all other choices you make depend upon your having chosen to continue to live; you cannot choose anything else if you have not chosen to be alive.
Then, you have to choose to make and keep a to-do-list, right now, in the present moment, even if it is only two or three items long. As soon as you’re done reading or replying to this post, grab a writing instrument and make a list. You can choose to do that or not to do that, but it is your choice and you live with the consequences of doing so or not doing so.