How To Make Progress When Overloaded? (Day 62)
Image from Insight of the Day
This quote shows up on my Momentum Dashboard: "It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it." I am frequently guilty of wanting to get too many things done and ended up either not finishing or lost track of some tasks.
Over the years, I have tried many different productivity tools--project management, and GTD software--but nothing matters unless I block out time on my calendar to work on the tasks. It is the process that matters, tools are just tools.
I've been relying on Asana to manage my long list of TODO tasks, but recently I started moving the high priority items to Trello, so I have better visibility of the tasks. I have set up 3 different boards on Trello: Work (main focus), Personal Projects, and Learning. Then I set the work-hours and block out about 2 hours at night for personal projects, and an additional hour for learning (including the time for meetups and hackathons).
The only sure way to GTD is to make progress.
I work 8-ish to 6-ish at my full-time job every day, so to keep my side-project momentum, I've found I need to be really intentional about breaking down tasks into the smallest chunk of work that provides value. What this looks like for me: Instead of saying, "Build landing page," I'd have a task for, "Create the hero content for the landing page."
I'm still making progress, but it's much more achievable in my mind, which helps me stay motivated to sit down and get to work.
Hi Calvin,
while developing my App for a year now I have been using a simple kanban approach that helped me to keep track of my workload and getting things done. I have a trello board where I write little tickets (scrum approach) and whenever I finish one I drag it into the "Done" list. Nice and simple, when there is difficulties with a certain task I write down the issues into the ticket and proceed. I try to avoid multiple boars, because this means you have to switch between entities. I like to overview everything at once.
I have tried every method there is with organizing, processes, tools, etc. at the end they all failed because I wasnt disciplined enough to keep track of the tasks. The only thing that helped me was to sit down work on these little tickets.
When my App was still a sideproject I came home tired but in front of my computer I put a sign that said "Just 5 minutes". So I continued working on my Project for just 5 minutes and suddenly it became 4 hours.
What is your thought about physical exercise in order to become more productive?
Hi Calvin, I have some questions if you don't mind. How do you switch between the boards in Trello? Do you find switching the board and projects something that works correctly or can be improved? Do some of the projects include other team members? Do you also use Slack? Sorry for so many questions, I'm working on a related product that tries to simplify the above so your input will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!