How To Use Your Task Manager Effectively.
A simple way to manage what you have to do without the overwhelm and stress.
When someone is first introduced to a task manager, there is often a sense that all their prayers have been answered. From the moment they install their new task manager on their devices, they can offload everything they are trying to remember in their heads to an external source that becomes their “second brain”.
It can be liberating and exciting, and as you offload all those tasks and little reminders into your new task manager, it feels like a weight of expectation has been removed from your shoulders.
Yet, over a few days, the expectation of freedom that your task manager gave you begins to crumble. You notice you are adding a lot more tasks than you are completing, and the area where your lists (folders or projects) are kept is starting to look overwhelming.
You also find you are still forgetting things because you haven’t entirely developed the habit of collecting everything. Thus, you begin a state of flux, collecting around 75% of your commitments and keeping the remaining 25% in your head.
There is a learning process whenever we learn something or build new habits. We don’t read a textbook, and all the information is miraculously stored in our heads. Humans don’t work that way. There are incredibly complex processes at work when we learn—so complex that even the smartest Neuroscientists have not yet fully figured them out.
One thing we do know is that learning and mastering something takes time.
There’s a lot of repetition involved and many mistakes to be made. That’s the learning process, and it’s perfectly fine. Indeed, the more mistakes you make, the better you will learn. Hence, the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up for still making mistakes. Becoming frustrated with yourself because you haven’t got something working exactly how you want it will stop you from mastering whatever it is you want to learn.
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How do we get a task manager working?
The first thing to do is to familiarise yourself with your new task manager. Go through the menus and settings. Learn everything you can do with your new task manager.
A typical task manager is composed of three areas:
The collecting area. This consists of an inbox of some sort. This is where you collect all your new tasks and reminders. Learning to get stuff into your inbox is the first thing you need to do. If you are not collecting, there will be nothing to see.
Collecting should be a habit. No matter where you are, you want to be able to collect new tasks. Ideally, you want to set up your phone so that adding a task requires very little resistance. Being able to use voice assistance to collect tasks with Alexa or Siri is a huge bonus.
The second area is your tasks for today. This is the list of tasks you have dated for today. This is where the digital task manager outperforms the humble to-do list: as long as you have added a date to a task, it will automatically appear in your today list when it is due.
In a to-do list written on paper, you will need to manually move tasks to today; if you don’t, you will end up with a massive list of things to do that becomes impossibly overwhelming. Your task manager takes care of this by showing you only tasks with today’s date in your list for today.
And finally, there are your projects, lists, or folders. This is where you hold tasks that are related to one another in some way. These lists are holding pens for tasks that are yet to be done (or you haven’t yet decided when you will do them).
