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One of the founding principles of organization is list making, and with good reason. The human brain can only remember 7 things at once and we have long since past the days when this was enough ram for all our to dos. These days we have hundreds of little projects, broken down into thousands of things to do. The only way to handle these things is will fast, efficient and reliable list making. I happen to be a believer in GTD, so this is the system that I will encourage Ms. Urban to adopt.
As with any organizational system, the most important thing to do is be consistent. The number one reason why these systems fail, is that we fail to use them consistently enough, which only creates more work for ourselves when we end up straddling three or five half working systems all tied together with our frazzled, overstretched mind that wants to be thinking about other things to begin with. The whole point of being organized is to enable you to STOP thinking about things. So the more work you put in up front in making sure your system is comprehensive, the sooner you’ll be able to spend a fraction of what you currently spending thinking about things you don’t want to be thinking about.
So here is my suggestion based on a system that has worked quite nicely in the past. Gubb is a fantastic online list making software that is free to use. It’s the single best organization software I have found. It is simple and flexible, yet not so flexible that you lose organization focus and go nuts.
So here is what we do. Like David Allan suggests, we create one monster list of everything that you can possible think of that needs doing. If it has a due date, add it. If it has a context (store, phone, computer, etc.) add that in parenthesis. Once you’re finished, group the to dos into projects. For each project, create a new list and make it purple. For the leftovers, turn the list green. This is your queue. Then create a yellow list. This is for everything that you are waiting on. Then create a red list. This is everything that must be done today. Every next action gets a star. As you choose what to do the next day, add items to the red list. And that’s it!
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