Further to my last blog about categorising and prioritising to do lists, what do you do when you have tasks which you have to do on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis? You could write a to do list every day/week and put these items on it each one or, for the daily or weekly tasks, you could not put them on your list at all, after all you do them on a daily or weekly basis so you won’t forget them, right?
If you’re like me, you won’t forget to do them but it is still useful to be able to cross an item off the list. I find this helps on days where I have had to re-shuffle some of my tasks and some of the regular tasks have been pushed back from the time or day that I would normally do them. For example, for one client I send out their invoices on the first Wednesday of the month but sometimes other work takes priority and I don’t get to it on that day so I have to push it back to Thursday or Friday. If I don’t have it on my to do list it can easily be forgotten if I haven’t done it on the usual day.
So, do you use a paper or computer to do list? I use both. I have a computer to do list on Outlook to put in my repeat, or recurring, tasks and then print it out and add other tasks to it as they come in. I find that a task list attached to my email (eg Outlook, Windows Live, Google) is particularly useful for creating follow-up tasks for emails received or sent.
Going back to my regular tasks which may be pushed back, I find that being able to set reminders for these is particularly useful as when the reminder comes up, I can choose to “snooze” it for anything from 5 minutes to about 5 days. This means that I am reminded that the task is still outstanding at a later time.
