Get Everything Done

David Coyer asked about my Day Page, so here is a sample: https://postimg.cc/MvLWcbFS.

(I have the strangest feeling that I posted one of these a few years ago, but I’m not sure, and it’s probably evolved anyway.)

I start these pages on the last page of a notebook, so that each day’s page ends up on top of the previous day’s, and I can easily peek under for reference and copy-overs. In the front of the notebook (not shown), going in the conventional forward direction, I keep a running shopping/errand list. This one notebook, then, is all I need when driving anywhere, telling me when I need to be where and what my options are for ad-hoc shopping or walk-in tasks. If I anticipate having a work session (waiting for car service?), I also bring the Long List notebook.

On this hypothetical day, I want to first remember to take out the trash, so I wrote that in the night before. I probably also wrote my car service appointment the night before, and the reminder that my phone call to the insurance company would fit in nicely while I am waiting for the car—only because that idea came to me while writing the list, otherwise I would have left the space blank.

The rest of the left-hand column I might have written also the night before or in the morning right after taking out the trash. I am going to my daughter’s high school for a basketball game that starts at 6p, so I had better leave work by 5:30p, and on the way, I need to pick up the dry cleaning. In the evening, I want to remind “S” to confirm the travel dates of her high school trip next month, because we got conflicting emails about it.

Some of these items may be on my electronic calendar(s), some may be on sticky notes people have stuck to my desk, and maybe I caught a glimpse of the dry cleaning stub by my phone and said, “Oh, yeah…” but now they are all together on a surface that will be exposed to me continuously all day.

On the right side, I jotted down the first three things on my mind in the morning: complete that application for a work seminar, review the budget, and check on the exterior painting that was supposedly done yesterday—it’s getting dark early, so when I got home yesterday, I couldn’t see well enough to check.

Once I got to working, I wanted to dig in to the application, but I had a nagging feeling about things on my Long List, so first I wrote “LL session” and dotted it, and after spending enough time on the LL to be no longer worried about it, I crossed it out and dotted the application (top item on the right) to work on.

I got a few pages of the application done, so I crossed it out and rewrote it at the bottom, and I switched to the budget review: second item on the right, dotted it, then crossed it out and rewrote it at bottom. At this point, I decided on another Long List session, and towards the end of that, my dad called and left voice mail. Since I felt like I was about done with the Long List at that point and unlikely to work my way back to the open page, I wrote his call on my Day Page instead. This could have gone on either list, whatever would have felt smoothest at the time.

The application and budget review also could have gone on the Long List instead of the Day Page. It just depends whether they are on my mind when I’m going over the Day Page in the morning. Again, it doesn’t really matter, and I’m not trying to make up a rule about it. All I need is a frictionless way to get it off my mind in a way that feels secure. Maybe I know it’s on my Long List, but I’m not sure how far back, and I can already feel myself worrying about whether I’ll hit it before something else distracts me… write it on the Day Page, done, get going.

It looks like I forgot to check the paint job as I was leaving the house! Oh well, I’ll copy it to tomorrow’s left column, as I did for this morning’s trash, and try again.

Cricket,

I like the idea of a Week Page onto which I copy things from a longer list and then don't have to look at the list, but for the usual multitude of small tasks, a week has always been way too abstract of a time interval for me. It's like guessing how many paper clips can fit into a bath tub. I can estimate how many milk jugs will fit in a bath tub, but not paper clips!