Showing your To-Do List Who's Boss

My first struggles with staying on top of my projects came at the age of nine when I started fourth grade. The earlier grades were relatively peaceful (although I never really got the hang of painting on an easel, but anyway...). A bunch of changes came in fourth grade: homework, take-home projects, and rotations with different teachers. There's no way to sugarcoat this—those rotation teachers were evil. The social studies teacher in particular, a hyper-critical, 50-something woman with some real (let's call them) eccentricities, never missed an opportunity to level mean-spirited criticism at us. She took daily shots at our disorganized looseleaf binders and sloppy scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. I hated most of that fall term.

One of the other teachers (I can't remember which one) had a helpful suggestion when she saw that I was struggling: I should keep a pocket-sized notebook in my back pocket, and whenever I'm given a new assignment, I should instantly pull out the notebook and add the new job there. When I finish an assignment, I should put a line through it in the notebook. That simple suggestion helped to turn the tide of negativity around. I started remembering what I had to work on after dinner and, as a result, my homework record started improving. The daily nattering started to subside, and my stress levels went down.

I have to grudgingly admit that these Pink Floyd moments from my childhood (and I'd imagine that we've all had some similar experiences) helped prepare me for new challenges in school and work. Even today, when I'm overwhelmed, it's usually because I've forgotten to keep track of my projects someplace other than my head. School is the place where you learn to manage a to-do list and juggle multiple deadlines. That skill will serve you for the rest of your working life. If you're a student reading this, I hope that you'll consider the suggestions below about keeping track of your many projects in an outliner like Idea Cruncher.

photo of a notebook and pen

But first, a little bit more about my rocky road to understanding how to manage my own to-do list. When I started working for a living, the little pocket notebook was replaced by a regular-sized coilbound notebook that held everything I needed to know about. It was better than nothing, but the sheer number of projects that I had on the go at any given time meant that the notebook got a tad disjointed. If you flipped through the pages, you would see to-do lists, meeting notes, project planning ideas, rough notes and sketches, presented in the order that I worked on them. For any issue that I needed to follow-up on, I put a little asterisk with a circle around it in the margin so that I could easily find all of my responsibilties while flipping through my notes. Every few days, I would go through and gather up all of the starred items and put them in a more formal to-do list, which I tried to keep to 20 items or less. To call these notebooks tough-to-follow would be putting it very kindly. The system that had served me well in the fourth grade needed some revising.

I started working on Idea Cruncher just before I read David Allen's excellent book called Getting Things Done (often abbreviated on the web as GTD). I was able to try out many of the GTD ideas using the Idea Cruncher prototypes. I still use the coilbound notebook for rough drafts and sketches, but the to-do list has moved entirely to Idea Cruncher. I'm going to describe the process that I use for managing my projects in Idea Cruncher, largely inspired by GTD. I'm not going to do the GTD approach justice here—if you haven't read the book, I'd recommend giving it a look. It's a very fast read and it has lots of practical advice.

In the meantime, I'd like to encourage you to download the 30-day demonstration version of Idea Cruncher and try managing your to-do list for the next month using the process below. The big question to ask yourself as you go through this trial process is whether you enjoy your project work more when you're working with Idea Cruncher. For me, the answer was yes, and I've been using Idea Cruncher pretty much every day since 2005. I'd love to hear your questions or stories about how this trial process is going for you. Please feel free to contact me.

To Do List Process

  1. Download Idea Cruncher and start the free 30-day demo.
  2. If you haven't already, have a look at the basics of working with Idea Cruncher.
  3. Start Idea Cruncher and make the following list of categories: Inbox, Burning Issues, Today, Projects and Someday.
  4. Save this as todo.idc, either on your hard-drive or, if you use more than one computer regularly (e.g., home and work) put it on a thumb drive.
  5. As new assignments come in, add them to the Inbox. The Inbox is a temporary holding area for new stuff so that you don't have to remember it. If you are a student, consider keeping a separate small notebook for assignments. Record the new projects there as you receive them. When you get home, copy them into Inbox.
  6. Try to get into the habit of emptying the Inbox every night. Everything should go into one of the other categories. The Inbox is just a temporary list of stuff waiting to be processed.
  7. Make a list of all of the important or urgent jobs under Burning Issues. Don't put any detail there, just a flat list.
  8. When you turn on the computer in the morning, make sure that Burning Issues is the first thing you look at. These are the things that you really want to focus on. It sounds silly, but it can be very easy to forget what the big things are when they aren't due that week (or day).
  9. The section called Today contains another flat list of the four or five things that you want to work on that day. A lot of times there will be significant overlap between the Burning Issues section and the Today section, as there should be.
  10. Put most of the details about your projects under Projects. You can add as many ideas as you want under any idea so you can make a plan for a project as detailed as it needs to be. When you are working on the plan for a project, you can temporarily hide everything else in the tree (just right-click the project you want to focus on and choose "Zoom In" from the popup menu). To bring everything back, click the "Show All" button in the upper right corner of the tree.
  11. Try to get a project sketched out in as much detail as possible before you start working on it. Of course, when you start planning, you'll just have a title. The process you use to sketch the project out depends on the nature of the project, but cycles of brainstorming and organizing usually work wonders. More ideas about project planning with Idea Cruncher can be found here.
  12. The goal of the project planning process is to identify the individual actions that you need to perform to accomplish the project. A lot of people try to do the project before they identify the actions, and the result is unnecessary stress. Actions are so important that the Idea Cruncher has a special category for them in the tree. You can change any idea into an action by right-clicking on it and choosing "Action" from the popup-menu. When you do, the blue sphere beside the idea in the tree turns into an orange arrow. You can see a list of everything in the tree that you've identified as an action in a separate area at the bottom of the Idea Cruncher window: a to-do list representing the actions you need to perform in all of your projects.

    13. tree showing some actions

  13. As you complete actions, check them off in the tree by right-clicking them and choosing "Completed" from the pop-up menu. In addition to giving you an at-a-glance picture of where you are on the project, checking the actions off as you finish them will give you a shot of whatever brain chemical is responsible for satisfaction.
  14. Put longer-term goals in the category called Someday. These are things that may become projects at some point, but aren't necessarily on the top of your list.
  15. Keep this list beside the computer. If you feel yourself starting to slip, or you start feeling overwhelmed, give the list a look.




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