Doing all of your planning in one place

[Cron]

Doing all of you planning in one place is fairly standard advice.

I never took it. I felt weird about combining my work to-dos with my private life to-dos. I have the kind of job that I don't deal with once I am home, so I figured there was no need to smoosh things together. I could just leave my to-do list pad for work, at work. I was also motivated by fear. I guess I felt a little embarrassed if someone would look at my to-do list on my desk and see private to-dos.

I decided that was nonsense as I would not put things like "see my Dominatrix on Saturday" on any to-do list ( joke! ), nobody would be "peaking", and I was getting a proliferation of to-do notebooks. Home to-dos, work to-dos, positive habit setting to-dos, and a food diary.

It started to feel like logging was a chore in itself.....let alone planning.

Today, I decided to start over with just one big loose leaf paper sized pad, combing work, home, habits, and the food diary onto one "to-do" list for the day.

I have to say, I feel a lot less overwhelmed.

I also feel like I am looking at my day more holistically

I wish I would have tried this sooner.

[Interpreneur]

I agree. At least for me, doing all my planning in one place works much better than having different to-do lists spread out all over town.

After all, we only have one brain, so it makes perfect sense.

[DarkSociologist]

You have to balance the complexity of the system with the number of tasks. If you have a relatively small amount of tasks, then a simple system will fit work wonderfully. As you begin to gain more and more tasks, a simple to-do list becomes so disorganized that it is hard to keep track of everything. This is when you need to begin separating your todo lists again.

Think about a company. When it is small, then it is ok for everything to be maintained by a single or relatively few people. Now take a look at some major corporations like IBM or GE. It would be impossible for them to put everything into one division, so they break the business tasks apart (into finance, accounting, marketing, etc).

Although breaking the business tasks apart require a much greater coordinated effort, it helps to keep things organized when you have many things to deal with.

[Tayrak]

I also add charts to my lists. It gives you a look at how you are doing and you can compare it to just about anything. I find this most useful if I have to have a certain amount of output in relation to the time I have available. A pattern makes itself apparent in a big hurry and you can see where you either have to improve your output or make concessions since you've reached your capacity. I use excell so it doesn't include any extra 'notebooks' I can have my lists and charts all in one place.

[Ilya]

Hi Cron. I've had the same situation. To keep the long story short, I keep my work-related tasks separately, everything else together. It helped me to keep my work tasks out of my mind when I'm out of work. It also reduces the temptation to do personal stuff at work. Depending on the media, the separation can be as simple as having the work tasks at the back end of the pad progressing towards the center. Or just one folder. Currently I use my PDA for task keeping, and I keep work tasks in one separate folder. I don't know if it even counts as "separate".