Daily Movement

I’ve been meaning to publish this technique for compactly tracking periodic tasks, both their completion and upcoming schedule on paper. There are also a couple of glyph techniques for using the limited area to best ability for tracking planned tasks, completed tasks and multiple tasks per week.

I use a 3×5 sheet organized as a spreadsheet with starting day of week (for me it’s Sunday) as the column heading (vertically written to save space — remember this is only 3 inches wide) and particular periodic tasks grouped into their contexts as row headings. Once every couple of months when I’m about to run out of space on the sheet, I shift the dates over with a little overlap, print out the sheet again, copy over the markings for the last couple of week so that I have a visual history of tasks so I can continue the trend, and put the sheet back in my Circa notebook.

The width of the week columns is such that i can place a small paper clip vertically as a marker of the current week.

An example of my categories and tasks are:

• @financial
  tasks involving paying bills and people, periodically checking financial accounts
• @errand
  getting haircut, picking up prescription medicine
• @health
  working out, various health tests
• @home
  things involving the car such as washing it, oil change, checking tire pressure, etc.

Only the @errand category really corresponds to a context that I actually use. The others are just to group together the entries.

About the image, I place a filled in circle in box when the task was done for that week. This means the task can only be tracked for being done at most once a week. The tasks that are done every few weeks can be measured and scheduled by counting out the boxes and drawing an empty circle for the week the task should be done.

The difference between a circle versus a triangle in corner is the circle tasks are best effort and can be forgotten, but the triangle ones must be done, e.g. they are bills or people that need to be paid.

For tracking a task that is done more than once a week, i fill in the entire area in increasing pattern. If it’s three times a week, as in my exercise goal, the first time, i fill in the triangle, 50% of the area. The second time, i fill in another triangle covering 75% of area, leaving a triangle at bottom. Third time, i fill in the last 25%. It’s hard to cut a square/rectangle in thirds.

Update for 10/30/2007:
An easier to see image:

And here’s a Word doc that you can use to produce your own: periodic-tasks-sample.doc

Well, it’s not as sophisticated as an emacs or vim based program, but it has simplicity going for it.

http://todotxt.com/ 1,000 people on del.icio.us think it’s worth bookmarking…

From 43 Folders, Merlin Mann talks of the “email DMZ” concept to quick start your good habits by giving you a clean workspace with little initial effort.

If you ignore for a moment the puzzle of reforming bad habits so that the same bad state isn’t reached again, this same concept can be applied to other habits that you want to break.

• eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks
• spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing
• keeping your office and workspace clean

Putting my own spin on it, you reframe the problem of changing your mind gradually to effect the new habit to the problem of avoiding discomfort/guilt/shame due to breaking your currently perfect streak of new behavior. If you’re able to act in a zero tolerant, self-disciplined way with little or no slippage back to old routines then this can work great. It may be some effort, so choose your battles.

So in the examples,

• keeping your office and workspace clean

  put all crap into boxes in the corner or closet until you have a clean office. Then along with keeping office from ever getting dirty again by not letting one paper or thing start to rest on the desk overnight, also start the task of periodically emptying out boxes into the trash, into a file, into your notes, etc.

  In cleaning my office, i still have boxes and big manila envelopes of “organized stuff” stacked, and a couple of isolated piles out of eyeshot which I still need to process, but it doesn’t get in the way any more.

• spending of time in ways that you don’t want to such as web surfing

  just stop reading your favorite sites with intention of never going back there unless you’re searching for something specific. If you start to click towards that old area, call it to your attention and ask, “am i going to do that again?” as if you had broken that habit for so long and now you’re about to fall off the wagon.

• eating of foods you want to stop, such as sugary, fatty, blended caffeine drinks

  stop cold turkey. As you walk by the store in the morning, if your feet fail and turn into the door, you can try to game your mind to make yourself feel guilty.

Then again, I might not want to fight this particular battle.

Here’s some free advice on breaking a habit.

If you’d like to contribute, please comment here and i can incorporate (and attribute) your suggestions into the page, or just go wild with the creative commons idea of making derivative work.

Enjoy and thanks.

Along the lines of simplifying processes, such as “using one big file”, why use 43 folders if most of your work is done in non-paper (electronic) form? It makes you look at an empty folder almost every day, except on the two or three days a month when a bill is due and a check needs to be written, for example.

Why not just 12 folders, one for each month of the year? Bills and things that have to be checked sometime roughly in that month (like a rebate receipt or a health care reimbursement that should have completed) rather than on a particular exact day are dropped in the folder for that month.

Folder is checked periodically (say each Monday).

The amount in folder should be small anyway since we’re doing most of our work electronically, right? So it’s low effort to scan through entire month worth of stuff each time.

Now, don’t you all go registering 12folders.com at once now…