gtd

Now that I have started to write in the morning instead of leaving it as a last thing of the day there are other things that I have noticed are left for later. There is always the last thing to complete for the day and it seems it's usually the dame task that I keep postponing as late as possible.

Does this tell something about those tasks? Probably, they might be the ones I'm least exited to complete or require most energy. It's definitely not about not having an opportunity to complete them earlier.

For my daily productivity I have a system. The system works well for most of the tasks but for a long time I struggled following up with a certain type of tasks: the things I shouldn't be doing.

Those tasks could be marked done only at the end of the day as I wouldn't know earlier whether I will break them or not. That meant I'd need to remember such things until the end of the day if I did fail them. An unnecessary distraction.

There is yet-another-todo-list I'm actively using: browser tabs.  It's more temporary one. The tabs are supposed to be there only for a short while until I get back to them. In reality they just keep collecting up there (on several different browsers and devices).

I have way too many such of a lists, but still I find myself not being able to transfer all of those pages opened in tabs to any of those lists. They just feel irrelevant to any of them. They also work a bit differently. 

It is said that well well planned is half done. Good plans are important to any task, but is it better to have perfect plans or getting something done?

No matter how much you plan it won't make anything ready. There is also always things that are impossible to plan ahead. You can only plan for the unexpected, but those surprises need to be handled as they appear. Unless you want to get back to the drawing board every time it happens.

A week ago I broke one of my streaks. I just somehow forgot to do that at the time. I could have felt disappointed. After all I had a whopping eight different streaks going on at once.

The fact that I managed to keep up all those streaks is in itself already an accomplishment. And I did it for one month! I definitely didn't fail at anything. I achieved something great. That was over 240 tasks done in one month. 

I have twenty different things I follow daily. I have been iterating my system over the past three years actively and am finally found somewhat good balance with it. It might not be perfect and I still keep altering it whenever I feel like I have a better idea. But for that I need to have a closer look at it every now and then. What would be a better way to evaluate the effectiveness of any such system than the results it yields?

Some tasks are just too big or uncomfortable to do that the feel intimidating. But those tasks need to get done too. So which one is better to start with.

Eating the frog refers to a quote by Mark Twain. He said that starting with the task you are least motivated to do makes the rest of the tasks easy. If you have worst behind you there is nothing stopping you anymore.

Getting started is hard. Everybody knows that. And therefore there are countless tips and guides on how to get started. After all, once you get started everything will be fine. Right?

Not necessarily. It can also be hard to keep going in the middle, but what I'm talking today is finishing something. Not just get something done, but actually get it done, once and for good.

It might not be that easy as it sounds. It is, in a matter of fact, possible to procrastinate finishing up something. I found it out today. 

A couple of days ago I wrote about my daily productivity system. There, I mentioned I have a total of eighteen items in my daily task list divided into five separate categories. Now, I'm going to tell you what those are.

I think I haven't written about my productivity system in its entirety. At least not for a while. And as I'm constantly trying to improve it, anything I have written previously is probably outdated anyway.

The system is pretty simple at its core: I have a list of daily tasks I want to compete every day. The items on that list aren't any particular tasks, but rather categories of things to do. The list is further divided in (currently) five categories. Every day I have a simple goal of completing enough items from that list to satisfy two rules: