Ask IH : How do you organise/manage your (personal) goals along with daily tasks?
Hello IndieHackers,
I am curious to know how do you manage to organise and execute tasks related to your personal goals like learning to play instrument, taking an online course, writing a book or even improving your relationship etc. along with effectively managing your daily obligations like 9 to 5 job, dropping/picking kids to school (if you have kids) or cooking, because these tasks are always urgent and its easy to ignore your long term goals in favour of meeting your daily obligations.
For organizing tasks, there is this book by Chet Holmes called the Ultimate Sales Machine. And it has a ~8 page time management chapter which I like. It says something like: you are an executive, you are going to have too much to do. So silo everything into different aspects of the company—which—could be 30 silos for some people—and then in each silo, find what would make the most impact for that aspect of the company and focus just on that.
So it is like a sequencing of your time, not working from a list of tasks. Your focus is on scheduling a slice of time for each silo, and then inside these slices you are only concerned with meeting the objectives of that silo. Meaning when you are in a silo, you only focus on improving that silo and ignore everything else for a concentrated slice of time—knowing in the back of your mind you will get to other important silos.
I do that with my life, I have an hour where I just focus on "learning" programming, another where I focus on "blogging." Etc. It works well for me, I need that structure—but I know that different people respond differently to different systems and I think that is beautiful too.
That's sounds like a nice way of 'categorising' aspects of life (work/learning/family time etc). How do you keep track of these silos? I mean do you use any app or something like that?
Dynalist has been great for managing all kinds of lists. I used to live in org-mode but dynalist (and the android app) make it super easy.
Thanks for the response Thomas. I will check Dynalist.
Hi Manan, as a Zenkit team member, I use the project management tool every day in my work life, however, I find that it's also useful for managing my personal tasks and goals as well. The app has features such as a to-do list, Kanban board, and calendar view that can help with tackling pesky tasks. You can also switch on notifications to ensure you don't miss a thing. Using the tool keeps me on top of things, and with improved productivity with my daily tasks, it has left me more room to accomplish bigger goals. It's worth checking out: https://zenkit.com/
Also, if you're looking for a workflow system, I highly recommend GTD: https://blog.zenkit.com/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-things-done-3cc1a5123b98 or time-blocking: https://blog.zenkit.com/why-you-should-be-time-blocking-and-not-just-writing-to-do-lists-b0c84052f6af
Google calendar has made some great updates over the past couple years. I have various silos set up for each aspect of my life as different calendars. I try to block off my time in a way that helps me stay balanced, and helps me reach my professional goals. This helps me because I know that time is my most limited resource, and seeing everything on a calendar helps me make the most of each activity.
I am using some printed pages from this planner for daily task management and it's working well. The printed pages don't gave long term planning but I expect there'll be a section for it when the actual notebook arrives
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/965524310/evo-planner-the-worlds-first-personalized-flow-sys
My method is based around one-week sprints, with my long-term goals spanning ten weeks. A PDF of my weekly plan is over at http://twentyweeks.com/assets/weekly-spread-sept-20-2017.pdf Hope it helps!
Thanks R. Martin for the response. Your method looks interesting. I am curious to know how effectively are you able to follow this technique and still manage to meet your long term goals without lapse? Also do you have to reschedule daily tasks often due to some adhoc urgent tasks eating up your time?
Pretty effectively, I think. The challenge is making sure your daily goals help you baby-step your way to the long term goals, and the weekly planning and review help with that, ala Agile sprint planning in software development.
Yes, I reschedule daily tasks a bunch. But as long as I can make one or two steps per day towards where I need to go, that's surprisingly enough.
Consistency is not difficult, but for some reason, we humans have difficulty keeping long term in our minds. Nobody starts a week with a goal of 10 hours of netflix and 5 hours of facebook for that week, but I'd wager that quite a few of us do that anyway. Having your priorities (long and short term) in right in front of you helps.
Right now personally, I manage everything on a very ad hoc basis. But as you said that creates issues because It's hard to priorities the right things that way. I often postpone some obligation unit I feel that its absolutely urgent, but then it can be too late.
Do you think todo lists or some tech can help you to may be organise or categorise tasks into urgent and important ones? I was facing this issue of missing deadlines to some urgent (and often important tasks) but then I started to follow Eisenhower matrix (https://blog.trello.com/eisenhower-matrix-productivity-tool-trello-board) and that helped a bit.
I think if someone's messy or just don't value other things in life less, no tech or technique can help
This is definitely true. But I believe tech can also help as it is easily accessible (via phone), synchronized across platforms etc while it can be bit tricky to implement similar system in just normal journal (not saying it can't be done, there are folks who do this effectively but tech is easier for beginners is what I think)
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