Get Organized for College: Week 3 Task Management

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from The Marble Jar Channel and today's video is the third in a 7-part series to help you Get Organized for College.  Even though this targets college students, it could be helpful for anyone who is struggling to organize life!  This video deals with choosing a task management system to handle your daily to do list, recurring tasks, and future tasks.

By this point in the program, you should be keeping up with your incoming communication streams (Week 1) and have set up a calendar for all of the events in your life (Week 2).  Great job!  Those are two of the most crucial ways to stay organized.  This week we'll talk about task management -- or how to remember things and get them done.  Tasks are different than events.  Unlike events, tasks do not necessarily have a predetermined start time, stop time, and  location. They may have a due date, but there is usually no specific timeframe given to accomplish the task.  A lot of people use a calendar for task management, but I would discourage this practice since a calendar is really best for events and doesn't allow you to migrate tasks that have not been completed to the next day.  Just like with calendars, for your task management, there are both

Digital and Paper Options

I feel less strongly about digital options for task management.   I do happen to use a digital task management app -- Todoist, but I think paper can be okay too.  And in fact, particularly for ADHD brains, paper can be better because of the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon.  So let's go through an option for each:

Digital - Todoist

The nice thing about Todoist is that it can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.  You can assign dates to your tasks or not.  You can have multiple tasks lists for different areas of your life.  For example, if you want to keep a list of tasks that you need to do when you are studying, you can keep an ongoing list under a Project called School.  Or you can make this more specific and create sub-projects beneath School for each of your classes.  Todoist really prefers that you assign tasks to a project, so I have a generic project called Reminders and most of my tasks that are not School or Work-related go into that project. 

To make a To Do List for today, go into your projects, determine which tasks you want to get done and apply today's date.  Now you can go into the Today view and see all of the tasks for your day -- regardless of what project they belong to.  A good option for a paper task list is a

Paper - Bullet Journal

This was specifically created by an ADHDer for his style of thinking, so it may appeal to you if this is the way your brain works.  There are a ton of videos out there on bullet journaling, so if this appeals to you, I would encourage you to watch several videos to give you ideas on how to set up your journal.  But in short, bullet journals have a supremely flexible format.  From what I can glean, there are really only 2 fundamental pieces of a bullet journal: the index which tells you how to navigate the journal and the dailies, which are how you plan what you will do each day.  In addition, there are options for future logs (to keep track of future appointments and tasks), monthly calendars and weekly calendars (for future planning), Collections, which can be logs or lists, and Trackers (which are a way of keeping track of anything you want: mood, exercise, sleep, friendships, etc.).   I'll come back and talk about some of these options in later weeks, but for the purpose of this week -- you really only need to set up 3 things:

• An index
• A global list of tasks - including a way to assign tasks to dates in the future
• Daily lists of what to do today

And remember, because it is not digital, there will be some manual steps that you'll need to remember -- the most important being migrating tasks that have not been completed to the following day or back onto the global task list. 

Hybrid  - Spreadsheet

There is also a hybrid option which allows you to organize your tasks digitally on a spreadsheet, but then print it out so that it's not out of sight and therefore out of mind.  I would recommend using a cloud-based spreadsheet like Google Sheets for this so that you can have access to it from your phone, computer, or really anywhere with an Internet connection.  This hybrid option takes away some of the creativity and spontaneity of paper task management, but allows you to use some of the efficiencies that come with digital fonts and sorting.  I've included a list of videos in the action list for you to watch to figure out which of these methods appeals to you most.

Features Needed

Here are the basics that need to be included in your task management system:

• Global Task List - A big list that you can add to constantly because your brain should be for thinking up new ideas, not storing them. 
• Recurring Tasks - A way to remember tasks that happen daily, weekly, monthly, etc.  With a digital app like Todoist, this is easy, but you'll need some kind of a system if you use a more manual system like a Bullet Journal.
• Future Tasks - You'll need a way to remember things that should happen in the future -- like getting your car inspected, signing up for classes, or renewing your passport.  You can use your calendar for this, but make sure you have a system to transfer this over to your task list so you can get them done.  And finally, perhaps the most important thing
• Planning Tasks - Your task list should allow you to plan what you want to accomplish today, this week, or this month. It should also have a way to migrate those tasks that don't get completed to the next day or week.

This Week's Tasks

This week you will be choosing a task management system and implementing it.  As with any system, it only works if you maintain it and use it, so it'll need to become a part of your daily routine.  Remember, we all have more energy for starting projects than we do for maintaining them, so make sure that it is simple enough that you'll be able to -- and want to -- keep up with easily.   There is a link to a worksheet containing all of your tasks in the description below. 

I'd love to hear how things go.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

Actions for Task Management Week