Alef Arendsen

I’ve been using my current TODO system for exactly one year now and I’m really happy to conclude that it works fabulously!

I’ve read all the books from The Seven Habits to Getting Things Done and took some advice from each and every one of those books, but never really adopted one specific TODO system. Getting Things Done, although supposedly quite light weight, is still too complex for me. I’ve also tried to use the Pomodoro technique for a little while a few months ago, but that also didn’t really prove very helpful.

What I’ve been doing in the last year is keep all my TODO in a moleskine booklet (or whatever you call that). On the right hand side, I keep my TODO items. The left pages are for notes and that’s also where I keep a bit of a diary (not every day, only occasionally). Drawings and notes that I don’t think are important go in the back of the book, so basically everything that’s not in the back of the book is important. Every page fits 19 TODO items and in addition to the TODO item itself, I keep track of when I started on a new page and when I finished that particular page (meaning all TODO items are done). I don’t keep dates for my TODO items and the only prioritisation I do occasionally is putting a little exclamation mark next to a particular item, meaning it’s a bit more important than the other ones. On top of that there’s two rules that I try to stick to:

• Never keep more than three pages with open TODO
• When a page has three TODOs that are not finished yet, I can move them to the next page, causing the previous page to be ‘done’

These two little rules keeps the amount of TODOs limited and also helps me get rid of some of the stuff that I don’t want to do. Today for example I had to call up somebody I hadn’t spoken to for ages and I was really stalling it. But I also had to write down a few new TODOs. These TODOs however would cause the third page with TODOs to fill up, meaning I had over three pages. I quickly made the phone call, moved the three left-over TODO items from page one to the next empty page and done I was.

Keeping my TODOs in a little notebook also gives me the ability to glance over what I’ve been doing in the past few weeks or months, which gives me a little bit of satisfaction (assuming I’ve done a lot).

The notes I keep on the left hand side are relatively limited. In meetings, I usually tend not too many notes. Only the important stuff goes in the book and if I need to take action, I immediately create a TODO item out of it. Last but not least, all my TODOs are in the notebook, not just work items, but also personal ones.

It’s taken me a while to settle on a particular system, but this one has really helped me focus and stay on track.

Current status: 15 things left to do