Sticky Notes Versus the To-Do List Tsunami

Earlier this year I replaced our kitchen sink. At one point I was faced with having to tighten down the basin drain, which comes in two parts: the metal ring on top of the drain hole, and the bottom part which screws into the top part, allowing water to drain down the pipe, instead of leaking out and filling the under-the-sink cabinet, something I know from experience.

I tried for thirty minutes to screw those two pieces of the basin drain together using the tools I had on hand, ruining a doohicky (you can tell how proficient and skilled I am in the building trades by my precise technical language) and ending up leaking water everywhere.

One of the four trips to the hardware store that weekend solved the leak. I’m now the proud owner of a basin wrench, which did just what it said it would do: easily screw the basin parts together saving my doohickies from an early death and my kitchen from an untimely flood.

Sticky Notes Are Not Going to Stop the Tsunami

When I was young I had a nightmare that repeated itself over and over again. I would find myself on a beautiful beach facing the ocean, at my back a sheer cliff that rose hundreds of feet in the air, clearly unclimbable. Inevitably a tsunami would appear heading towards shore, and the dream would end as the shadow of the monster wave covered me, and I would wake up, a scared-witless seven-year old.

The dreams stopped before adolescence, and with the passage of time it’s become clear that they were foreshadowing either the realities of running of a business, or my plumbing problems.

And I’m not alone.

In an unscientific survey of the more than 2000 small business owners I’ve worked with in the last ten years, the most common complaint I hear is “overwhelm.” (Almost no one mentions plumbing. Although, it must be said, I don’t ask.)

It’s such a common theme that it was one of the very first subjects I covered, back in December, 2001. I’ve also written about the spiritual answer to overwhelm, (which article was the seed for the workbook and audio class ‘A Solution to Overwhelm’ that comes with Creating Heart-Centered Websites.)

The spiritual side of overwhelm is critical, because it is mostly due to mindset. However, there’s another, more practical side to handling overwhelm.

Let’s get boring. Let’s get nitty-gritty. Let’s get this thing handled so you can be a hero for your business.

Let’s talk about organizing your tasks and projects.

Sticky Notes Are Not Going to Do It

Chances are neither will a little pad of paper, digital or physical. Here’s why.

Any live creature has, oh, approximately ten gazillion different things happening physiologically to keep it alive. Breathing seems simple, until you get down to the cellular level and see all the systems involved with the simple act of taking air in, breaking it down, and distributing it where the components need to go.

Your business is not nearly that complex, but it can seem as if it were. After ten years in business, here’s what I see each to-do needs:

The Needs of a Task

The needs of each of your tasks are fairly simple, but critical.

A due date: Seems obvious, but having a deadline for a task helps tremendously. And seeing all the deadlines for all your tasks together helps you assign due dates more compassionately, because you realize they can’t all be due “by 10 a.m. tomorrow.”

A start date: Vastly overlooked in the world of small business owners, if there’s anything that will help you avoid overwhelm is knowing that you don’t have to start working on or even thinking about this task until February 15. Try adding “start dates” to your tasks. You’ll like it.

A context: Do you need to be in your office, at your computer, on the phone, or running errands to get this task done? Naming the context means that you can be more efficient with your time by getting all of your errands done at once, or all of your phone calls done in a block of time, rather than constantly switching from creative mode, to administrative mode, to running errands mode. Keep it simple: for me, I just use “office” “phone” “errand” or “waiting for.” Hold it, “waiting for?”

If you’re waiting for something from someone, chances are they are even less organized than you are about tasks. If you aren’t tracking what you’re waiting for, you may never notice they didn’t get it to you until way too late. So you ask someone to send you a pdf you know they have by Friday. And then you set up a task: “Receive pdf from Josephina, Friday January 7, context: Waiting.”

A project: Most tasks are building blocks for something larger, such as getting your latest offer launched. Others are just single, one-off tasks, like “buy stamps” and so I put those in a project called “Work-Single Tasks”

Where’s That Wrench?

You only need to lose track of a few key tasks, miss a few deadlines, and look like an idiot in front of one or two clients before the need for the right tool becomes obvious. It’s okay to go back to the hardware store four times, as long as you end up with a tool that fits your needs and fits you.

I myself use Omnifocus, an application that syncs between my iPhone and laptop so that anytime I think of a task I can empty it into Omnifocus and stop thinking about it.

Choose a tool, put your tasks and projects into it, and then, as a final commitment to living a life without overwhelm, make yourself an appointment every week for 30-40 minutes to review and clean up your projects and tasks.

It took me about six months of playing with Omnifocus, tweaking, falling off the wagon and climbing back in until I found a way to make it work for me. So don’t expect an instant miracle.

Yet, if the heart of your business is yearning for this kind of support, and you’re tired of feeling overwhelmed and embarrassed from dropped details, take this on as a learning project for the first 3-6 months of 2011. I bet it turns your business life around.

Resources

I mentioned Omnifocus, which I love. But that’s just me. I asked on Twitter, and my tweeps came up with this list of alternatives:

@acdolph: Notational Velocity is a free mac app that lets you super easily work with a folder of text files.

@lesmckeown: Worketc.com is a nice cloud alternative. I loved living in TiddlyWiki for a year or so: