Time Strategies (One of Many Reasons I Love Spreadsheets)

 

Screenshot of a checklist I made earlier this year

The articles I read for this assignment were 11 ways unsuccessful people mismanage their time, How to Beat Procrastination and How Checklists Train Your Brain To Be More Productive And Goal-Oriented.

I found "11 ways unsuccessful people mismanage their time" notably lacking in solutions to a decent chunk of the problems they bring up. In all honesty, the very set-up of the article seems kind of demeaning, where it seems to be saying "if you do one or more of these, you're probably not successful". Regardless of what their intent may have been, they came across as being on their high horse.

On the other hand, "How to Beat Procrastination" was far more useful. I found their idea of finding the first step and then tying it to a reward to be a really solid idea. I also liked their idea of using the weight of inaction to increase the motivation to do the task. I hadn't seen that idea tossed around before, and I quite like it. While it may not help for all tasks, it can definitely be good for tasks that have a more balanced mix of pros and cons. 

"How Checklists Train Your Brain To Be More Productive And Goal-Oriented" didn't really teach me anything I didn't know, since I've actually used checklists to help motivate myself and stay on track for a long time, but it did give me the idea to look into maybe trying to use Trello for certain projects or long term sets of tasks I might have, since it allows for an easy way to map things out and keep the checklists flexible. 

I'd seen it used for game road-maps numerous times, but had never thought about trying to use it for myself. I think it could potentially be a good idea for keeping myself on track and focused while worldbuilding for my story universes, but it might also be a workable idea to set one up for my semester, since I could have checklists for individual days and overall checklists for larger spans of time or bigger projects. I'm not super familiar with the particulars of how Trello works, but I do have a decent idea of the kinds of things that can be done with it, so I think it'll be fun to experiment with it.

In the past I tended to use Google Sheets for checklists (one of them is pictured above), and I would include a section for a title for the task, a true due date for the task, an intended due date for the task and a section for any notes I might need. I found those were the key aspects of information I would need to be able to get a snapshot of my workload at a glance. 

I then also set up the check-boxes with conditional formatting to turn the row green and apply strike-through when the box was checked, and I have to say it's very much satisfying to work your way down it, slowly turning all of those rows of red to green (I unchecked the two boxes at the bottom so you could see what it looks like when the conditional formatting isn't enabled due to the box being unchecked). 

So I definitely know that checklists work for me, and I'm curious to give Trello a try to see if that might work even better for me than my Google Sheets ones do, at least for larger scale usage. Trello might be a bit overkill for a more short-term or simple checklists, but for much larger scales, I think Trello might offer a much better overview of my workload. Regardless, I'm looking forward to finding out!