If your like me your desire to be effective in your life with the time and resources God has given you is larger than your realized result. I have been pursuing the best mix of tool and simplicity for years now. Literally. There are so many apps to use on so many different platforms, Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows CE, Linux, Paper, notecard, moleskine, you name it I may have tried it and own more unused shelf ware than I care to admit. Most is from indie developers who had something that intrigued me and forced me to change yet again.
I have chased the Hit list and Things for over a year, and was a prepay user of Omnifocus. The later is the tool I chose to match up with a new tool, for what after a day seems like a really nice start. I know a day isn’t much in the fast paced world of “I forgot to do what when?” but there’s hope. Vitamin-R, yup I know the name is a bit mysterious and not what you immediately thought of when you started reading this article; but it reflects a solution to the problem I discovered I had. I can’t multitask. No really I can’t, and I dare say neither can you we all have a real built in inability to do 2 things simultaneously. That doesn’t mean we don’t try, and some are more successful than others, but I needed more help perhaps than some.
There is one place where GTD or autofocus or covey’s 7 habits all are correct, we can’t all remember what we need to do and desperately need somewhere to keep them written down until we do them. And I personally like Mark Forester’s method of review and dismiss from a actual piece of paper, which may be a followup post if Omnifocus with a dose of Vitamin-R doesn’t do thew trick. The key for me I had perceived was I needed some method of focusing and measuring success, while not allowing or trying to multitask. Pick one thing and then accomplish it, make sure it is the one thing you really need to do and get after it. Simple right. Wrong, most of our tasks are actually many little tasks under one over simplified label.
Enter the Vitamin-R piece of the puzzle, use whatever solution your inclined to track all the tasks and projects you need to, but then take the task you have decided is top or “possible” to dedicate at least a 10-15 minute chunk of time to and put into Vitamin-R. Then on the Now portion of the Now&Later board place a list of the smaller tasks that will need to be done to accomplish the task on the list if need be, or just place the task into the objective portion of Vitamin-R and kick it off. Let it hide the other apps you aren’t going to be needing, and focus on getting the task at hand done.
This is where I still have some issue with my current setup, I wish there was a way to pause Growl. If there was that would help tremendously, as it is I am currently not hiding but actually quitting twitter, mail and other tasks that pop messages up in front of my overly eager to go “Squirrel” mind. For those that have never seen the movie “Up” the previews of the dog that mid sentence gets distracted should be sufficient to illustrate my normal behavior when working on my machine.
So that’s it after one day thats where I am at. It’s not ingrained and I am sure will morph but uni-tasking is where I need to be if I ever want to succeed at getting anything done, or GAD. I’ll be cleaning up my Task/Project management page soon so check back for another post next week.
