I’ve been using Trello as my task organizer for a while now, and I’ve taken quite a liking to it. I have a single board that captures most of my active to-do list, sorted into four levels of urgency and tagged with five levels of importance. Why that particular level of granularity? I’m not sure… it’s a choice I made when I created the board and I’ve stuck with it since then. In any case, it hasn’t been working as well as I’d hoped.
The issues I’ve been having with my system are not about too much granularity, so much as a lack of awareness of the purpose of my lists and labels. The urgency-importance method of prioritizing tasks comes from Stephen Covey’s seven habits, and it may be the single most important takeaway from his book. It’s legit. The problem is that I have used it to make my task list look pretty, but not to actually make decisions about how to spend my time.
A big reason that I have recently been attempting to build stronger time management habits is that my natural, intuitive ways of choosing how to spend my time were insufficient for the stage of life I had entered. Marriage, raising a child and grad school are all pretty demanding, especially all at the same time. I no longer have the feeling that if I don’t get to something today, I’ll have time tomorrow. Trying to work on something that isn’t automatically at the forefront of my mind—like writing a blog entry—requires me to proactively carve out time for it and hold my ground against pressure from other demands.
My natural way of handling tasks has always been to choose them on the fly. If I have a couple hours between classes to sit down and get work done, I’ll just open up my task list and pick something. In some cases the choice is obvious, like when an assignment is due soon, but often it’s not so clear. In these cases my system does not work as intended, because as soon as I engage my cognitive decision-making apparatus, it reverts to my default method of choosing. And my default method of choosing is heavily weighted towards my mood and emotions at the time. If I don’t feel like working on something, I’m going to rationalize a way to work on something else. Added information about urgency or whatever is not going to overcome that natural tendency.
It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.
The problem, really, is that I’m making a choice at all. I’ve arrived at this same idea in many other contexts while attempting to change my habits. Elbert Hubbard is right—the decision is my weak point, not the action itself. The whole point of spending the time and effort to prioritize a task list is so that I don’t have to choose later, when I am at my weakest. If I’m going to gain any of the benefits of this system I’ve set up, I should be treating it like an algorithm that tells me what to do, that relieves me of the burden of choice.
Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but I’m coming around to the conclusion that it’s the right attitude, at least for me. Because as it is, my task list is effectively a free-for-all. It does a good job of capturing most of the things I have to do and presenting them in a logical manner, but it has no significant effect on the actual choices I make. And in the end, what I actually do is the only thing that matters.
School of Hard Knox 