81–84 of 84 posts
I tried doing it as a 30 day challenge. Those were by far my most productive days -- probably because taking a couple of minutes to figure out what was the most important to do that day meant I knew what to focus on.
Just curious, why didn't you stick with it?
I'm a freelancer, and I set my own schedule. I've logged virtually everything I've done in the past three years into Google Calendar. This is a way to get feedback on my actions, rather than listing my intentions. If it's a task I need to do daily, I build it into my morning or nightly routine. For example, my "sit down at desk" routine is to review and block out my time for the day in gcal. If it's not important eno…
Each task gets a Trello card and goes in one of four columns: Backlog, Ready, Doing, Done. I also have a bunch of labels (which Trello colour-codes) for things like "house", "blog posts", "projects" etc so I can see at a glance what type of task a card represents.
If I have a random idea for a project or something I might get to when I have some free time I stick it in Backlog so I remember it and can add notes etc. Things that need doing like "Mow the lawn", "Put down a batch of home brew", "Get the car serviced", "Call X about Y" go into Ready in rough order of priority. If something has a hard deadline I can add that to the card.
When a project or a blog post idea is at a point where I'm ready to start it I move it from Backlog to Ready, also roughly prioritised amongst the other cards. When I start a task I move it from Ready to Doing. As is generally the goal with kanban I try not to have too many tasks in Doing at once. Try to finish one thing before starting the next.
When I finish a task I move it to Done. Very satisfying...:)
Trello is free, has a great web interface and an excellent mobile app that will give you notifications when deadlines are coming or if other users comment on your board (if it's shared).
I've started doing this and it has done great things for my productivity. I just sit down with the trello board for my current project in one window and google calendar in the next window. I pick two cards, think about if I need to reach out to anyone in order to do them, and block out the time on my calendar. During the day, if I change what I'm doing, I change the events on the calendar. It makes it much easier to…
So you create an event "calling tom" from 09:00 to 09:30, then call tom? Then check how long that took, and adjust on calendar?
Note that I've not tried doing this for a day when I've got a bunch of little tasks to push through.