[Note: Following is the second part of a series on personal productivity. The first post is Email Control.]
Now that you know how to control your email, how to you deal with everything else? Throughout the course of your day, you gain ideas, discover tasks and learn of pressing needs that you absolutely can’t forget to do. How can you keep track of it all?
The key for me is streamlining my information-intake process. I used to be like my colleague who cobbles together a combination of post-it notes, scraps of paper, notecards and whiteboard scribblings, not to mention email in her inbox — all a recipe for an excessive cognitive burden! For me, the way to relieve stress — and get things done — is to limit the intake methods and funnel them into one master.
Intake Methods
Analog

[On a side note, I once lost one of my notebooks while walking in San Francisco. A kind-hearted person took the time to mail it to me, realizing how important it was — and perhaps appreciating what a humanizing tool it is! Thank you again, Sue Ann!]
Digital

Funneling to One Work-Management System
Limiting the intake methods and recording info is only half the battle, though. At the end of the day, I have two sources of information that I need to reconcile: my Field Notes to-do list and Evernote to-do list. It won’t surprise return readers of this blog to find out that my preferred solution for managing work at the personal level is the same as my preferred solution for team and organizational work: kanban.

I’ll go a bit deeper into personal kanban in my next post in this series. But for now, I’ll explain the basics. Essentially, I keep the columns (a.k.a. work stages) fairly simple:
- Options (not usually displayed)
- To Do: Stuff I’m wanting to work on next
- Doing: Stuff I’m working on now
- Done: Stuff I’ve recently completed

The really effective bit is the rows (a.k.a. swim lanes). I use cost-of-delay profiles (more on those later, too) for the lanes:
- Expedite: Stuff that needs to be done immediately
- Fixed Date (and Intangible Fixed Date): Stuff that truly has to be done by a certain date
- Standard Urgency: Stuff that needs to be done
Each morning, I spend a few minutes moving my to-do items from my two intake methods into my personal kanban. I use the cost of delay profiles to sort those tasks according to both “value” (or importance) and time. This is why using a simple tool like an email box or checklist is insufficient: It can’t distinguish between the time consideration of each item. Once I have created a card for each entry in my Field Notes to-do list or Evernote to-do list, I mark them as complete (Field Notes) or delete them (Evernote).

Knowing that I have captured and properly discharged every to-do item, I can relax, because:
-
- I don’t have to worry about anything slipping through the cracks.
- I don’t have to carry any of these things “in memory.”
- I have one place (my personal kanban) where my tasks live (and I don’t have to keep track of various disparate papers, post-its, etc.), which is perfectly fit for the purpose of managing work.
- I have decoupled the capture from the prioritization, so I don’t have to worry about when to do things.