How Do I Get Back to Basics With My Task Manager?

This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing.

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Episode 236 | Script

Hello and welcome to episode 236 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use. 

However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity. 

How do we organise all this stuff? 

Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time? 

What do I do with all my bank statements? 

And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep. 

What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics. 

And that is what I will be looking at in this episode. 

So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects? 

Hi Eric, Thank you for your question.

You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work. 

Let’s start with the task manager. 

All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today. 

On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you. 

Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and add a date to when you anticipate doing those tasks. 

Once you have that done, you can ignore all those project folders. They are just holding pens for tasks you think you need to do at some point in the future, but have not yet decided when they need doing. 

On a side note, one of the reasons I don’t like having individual project folders in my task manager is because they often fill up with tasks that don’t need doing. You just add these tasks because you don’t want to have an empty project folder. 

Creating a new online course, for example, could have hundreds of tasks in a project folder in a task manager. But ultimately there are only a few things that need to happen. 

Write the outline,

Record the course

Edit the videos

Publish the course

Tell people about the course. 

Five tasks. If you look carefully at these tasks, the outline needs around two to four hours, recording the course needs a full day, as does editing the course. 

Uploading and publishing the course will require around four hours and telling people about the course will need another three or four hours. 

My task manager will not help me much here. All these tasks will need to be on my calendar because I need sufficient time to work on them. My notes will be where my ideas and comments will go. 

All I need my task manager is to tell me to “continue working on the course”. There may be a few little tasks such as write course description, but until the course is outlined and recorded, I am not going to be able to do that. 

I certainly don’t need a project folder for something like this. I do need a note somewhere for my ideas and the outline will be in a spreadsheet. 

Your focus needs to be on doing the work, not organising your work. And that leads me to the next problem. 

For apps to be attractive they have to lure you in with more and more features. And rather than simplifying your workflow, all these features add complexity. And it’s this complexity that slows you down. 

It might sound great that your new task manager can connect to your Google Calendar. But then every few months you’ll waste thirty minutes or so having to reconnect the calendar to your task manager. All that does is cause you to lose trust in your system—which again means you will be checking that events and tasks are moving as they are supposed to between your apps—another waste of time.

Now, what about all those files and documents? Well, there is some good news here. Apple, Google and Microsoft have, in recent years, been working very hard on their system search. What this means is as long as you know a keyword, a date range or a title, you will be able to find a document whether it is on your computer, or cloud service (if you are using iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive).

You no longer need to develop complex folder structures for your files and documents. For example, If you create a Word, Google Doc or Pages file, you are encouraged to leave the file within the app’s file saving system. 

What this means is if you write a Word document, the document will be automatically saved in Microsoft’s Word documents folder. This applies to Apple’s Pages folder. All your documents are contained within the apps folder. 

You can then manipulate how your documents are listed. By date created, modified, title, size etc. You no longer need to create folders within folders for all your different projects. 

And as all these documents are essentially saved in the cloud, you can use your system search on any of your devices to find any document. Plus, this means you have a URL link which you can copy to your project notes so any relevant document can be found quickly via a single click or tap. 

When you focus on keeping your whole system as simple as possible, you will spend a lot less time having to go through folders looking for something to do. 

But again, it comes back to planning. Knowing what you want to get done the next day. 

If you maintain a simple system—a system based on when you will do your work rather than project tasks—the only thing you need to decide when planning the day is what needs to be done today? 

A daily planning session is not about going through your projects to see what needs doing next—that’s what the weekly planning session is for—a daily planning session is about deciding what you will do tomorrow based on your appointments in your calendar, and what your priorities are for the day and week. 

Of course, if you are not doing a weekly planning session, then your daily planning will become a weekly planning session and that will take up a lot more time. 

Seriously, all you need is thirty minutes on a weekend for weekly planning and ten minutes at the end of each day to plan the next. A total of around 90 minutes a week planning. —around 1% of your week. 

If you struggle to find that amount of time each week, you have a serious time management problem— or, as is more likely, a big self-discipline problem. 

The problem is the consequences of not doing these planning sessions. Not doing these sessions will result in you wasting so much time each day just trying to figure out what to do next—often what you end up doing is other people’s work. It’s much easier to say yes to someone’s request when you have no plan for the day. 

When you have a plan for the day, you’ll find you’ll say no to frivolous requests from your colleagues. You will also gain a lot more respect for your time from other people because they will see the results you are getting. 

The bottom line is if you want to be more productive and get more out of your time each day, you need to keep things simple. Stop wasting time trying out new apps in the hope they will make you productive. They won’t. 

Reduce your folders, you really don’t need them. Things to read can go into things to read folder, your documents can be kept in their documents folders. All you need to make sure is they have a recognisable title so you can use keywords to find what you are looking for by using your computer system’s search features. 

Make sure before you end the day you give yourself a few minutes to decide what needs doing tomorrow and never skip the weekly planning session. That is the foundation on which all productive weeks are built. 

I hope that has helped, Eric. Thank you for your questions. 

Thank you also to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.