Why I went from a Digital to an Analog to do list
A few years a go my life was in chaos,
in shambles
without direction
needing something to reign it in back to peace
That’s when I discovered the wonderful world of web apps and digital to do lists, yes you read correctly, not analog at this stage!
I eventually settled on one called Wunderlist as it was a simple, easy to use app and I absolutely loved the background images!
This worked well for me for a year. It was super simple to add items, the sound when you ‘ticked’ off an item was simply addicting! The problem started showing when you were adding heaps and heaps of tasks to a list, it just gets to be to much!
To solve this problem I simply created separate lists for different buckets. One for work, one for personal goals and one for those pesky mundane tasks.
This worked for 6 months, but as we all know the ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ principle applies when items are in different list’s that are not visible. So I wasn’t making progress on anything now!
This is when I took my digital to-do list and made it an analog one. Followwing the Japanese kanban scheduling system (To Do, Doing, Done), I created this on my wall with four buckets instead.
TODO – DOING – DONE – BACKLOG
This was much more motivating to be to complete tasks, as I could feel, see and touch the actual progress of an item. It take’s up a wall in my bedroom so it’s immediately there whenever I get up and when I go to bed, so it’s always in the back of the mind for what I want to complete.
As you can see I have quite alot in the done area, it is all from a secret project I worked on for the past 5 months, hence a lack of posts for a while! My current items are to make four vlog and blog tutorials per month. As you can see I quite often never get there. It’s amazing how fast time can escape you.
Any items that
- I don’t complete
- End up having no value after experimentation
- Get stuck in ‘ToDo’
will get moved to the backlog. This is to revisit later if it might ever provide any value value, otherwise it simply gets removed. This is not to get over loaded and focus on the important stuff!
The secret ingredient to all of this is making each item tangible. For example “I want to learn Japanese” is to big of a goal, it needs to be broken down. So in this case I added “I want to learn level 1 Japanese class to be able to have a basic conversation”. This way the goal is smaller, it’s tangible and it’s achievable. That is the one key takeaway from the kanban board, so I recommend it if you have the space, defiantly look at setting one up!
