Zhu Time management master Xiao, you know his power

[TOC]

Why refactor

trouble

Most of us use time management tools like tick lists and wonder lists, and keep track of a lot of things, but there’s no escape:

  • Headaches from looking at to-do lists that keep piling up, or forgetting temporary tasks from others
  • Create a messy list. What should a list record? Ideas? The plan? The schedule? Information?
  • Lists of ideas and actions are cluttered, many with no deadlines, and become a burden that feels like it hasn’t been done
  • I know the importance of making lists on a regular basis, but how many lists do you have? 30? How do I organize this?
  • Part of the management work, how do I work with the inventory tool to know what everybody’s doing on a macro level, so that I can design things from the top

Inspired by the

I use tools such as listing a number of years, has been the project latitude at work before, relatively has a natural sense of purpose, and so are not difficult to list, because after the work began to undertake more things on the plan, found that the existing listing tools use did not give me bring organized planning sense, listing became a slot, filled with thoughts and actions together, The list didn’t start to give me a clear indication of what TO do at what time, which led to more and more overdue tasks and more and more fatigue.

If you practice a listing tool, also have these doubts, total feel we not good according to our scheduled work every day, always feel in dealing with a temporary insert, vacant became the biggest feeling, work half a year for half a year the feeling didn’t do anything, you can see how I use refactoring tick list my time management system, There may be an answer.

Step by step refactoring

According to the 6 dilemmas prepared at the beginning, now start to discuss one by one, you can reveal the plot in advance, what is the solution of each dilemma, and after solving a complete set of time management system will be formed.

Dilemma # 1: Getting a headache from looking at a to-do list that keeps piling up, or forgetting temporary tasks from someone else

Here is a well-known theory in the field of time management called GTD(Getting Things Done). The idea of refactoring is also based on this theory, but the details will be cut down. Copying it completely may add additional mental burden.

This section focuses on sharing collection categories to break down long to-do lists without leaving anyone behind.

Dilemma 2: Creating a messy list, what exactly should the list record? Ideas? The plan? The schedule? Information?

This section will cover the underlying meaning of lists (purpose of lists ===) and share a few lists from an engineer’s perspective so that you can create lists with moderation in mind. And why I need to create a list.

Dilemma 3: The list of ideas and actions is cluttered. Many of them have no deadlines and become a burden on my mind. I always feel like I haven’t done anything

Tasks are attached to a list. This section focuses on refactoring tasks, explaining the proper use of kanban patterns to classify tasks, how to distinguish ideas, plans, actions, and make reasonable plans, and how to form an efficient schedule.

Dilemma 4: Know the importance of making lists regularly, but how many do you have? 30? How do I organize this?

Without retrospections, lists have no soul.

This section will share how to do a review and how to check yourself on a weekly basis. Keep the system going.

Dilemma 5: With a partially managed job, how can I work with the inventory tool to know what everyone is doing on a macro level so that I can design something from the top

In addition to managing yourself, using a checklist will help you manage others better.

It can be seen from the prominent font in the solution idea that once these five dilemmas are solved, a systematic time management methodology can be formed to collect, classify, plan, execute and review. Next, let’s make breakthroughs one by one.

Dilemma # 1: Getting a headache from looking at a to-do list that keeps piling up, or forgetting temporary tasks from someone else

At work we receive requests all the time, big or small, but they are all lumped together in a list called work.

To-do lists can have requirements that can accumulate over the course of a year. Some can take half a day to complete, while others can take weeks and require some planning effort, such as this one.

At work, we get a lot of work with deadlines, but we also get a lot of ideas that don’t have deadlines, and these are included in our to-do lists.

At first glance this also quite good, the work content is detailed record down, but will find that the list contains the project, in week [project home school circle v1.1], there are some days as the unit of small repair, repair recording studio lecturer style 】 【 will also have some don’t have an exact time little idea 【 packaging optimization.

As time goes by, there will only be more and more unfinished tasks in the figure above. How should we choose the key points to plan? And how do we sum up what we did this year when we come back in the middle of the year? How many XX projects have you done?

Keep in mind that most tasks without a deadline will never be completed, and most tasks without a deadline are valuable ideas that, when well executed, are a sign of high performance.

Another situation is that you may not have a list called work, you may be carefully divided into [project] [daily] [repair] and so on. One day your boss or colleague asks you a small thing, such as sorting out the component calls of a certain module, which will be useful tomorrow.

You don’t know which list is included in this trivial matter, which bothers you. This mental burden easily makes you forget to record this trivial matter in the list system. Besides, at present, you are focusing on other things, so when it arrives the day after tomorrow, it is no accident that you forget this matter.

In the final analysis, the collection and classification are not done well, so how to carry out effective collection and classification?

According to the theory of GTD and my practice, we can uniformly collect all the needs and ideas into the collection box of the tick list, and there are many ways to collect, siri, wechat forwarding, voice input, these temporary tasks can be easily into the collection box, waiting to be classified.

TIP

When random tasks come up, be the first to put them in the drop box and time them.

After collecting the second step, we need to process it again.

  • Do we need to rely on someone else for this
    • Yes -> Move to the “Waiting for Others” list, mark the completion time of others, and complete the communication loop
    • No -> Go down
  • Will it be done soon
    • Yes -> go down
    • No -> Move on to the future list. This is basically a list of ideas
  • Is it a small, scattered amount of work (troubleshooting, fixing problems, writing documents, political tasks
    • Yes -> move to the action List
    • No -> Move to the planned list, or make another list

This is the first classification, it seems to be quite troublesome, why do we have to separate these several more abstract lists?

The main purpose is to move some scattered, unsystematic things into these three lists. These tasks can not even be classified, and these things can not be put on the table during the year-end inventory, so as not to pollute our lists. As we will talk later, the fewer the lists, the better!

You don’t have to pay too much attention to these lists, especially the “To Do list”, where things have deadlines and can be done quickly.

At the appointed time, the tool will remind me to do these chores, so I just do them.

The Waiting list focuses on the things you don’t need to do, but that matter to you. This list helps us to complete the closed loop of communication and collaboration. For example, I remember one:

  • The WXSDK in the application reported an error

I don’t need to fix this thing, it is a package maintainer who can fix it. What I need to do is to discuss the time with him and remind me by the list when he gives me the time. I will check again to complete the progress of the thing.

TIP collects and categorizes for the first time, making sure everything has a specific time

Using the idea of GTD, we can group some trivial tasks into these three lists, alleviating some of the dilemmas described in this section.

Now that we can cover all of the mundane tasks at work, where do we put the heavy workload tasks, or tasks that take longer to complete, that are left over from the first category?

Dilemma 2: Creating a messy list, what exactly should the list record? Ideas? The plan? The schedule? Information?

The tick List premium membership limits the number of listings to 299, and if we only use the tick List tool as a recording tool, 299 might quickly become inadequate.

Work with millions of users around the world to record and plan big and small tasks in ticking lists, achieve goals in less time, and free yourself from the clutter of to-do lists.

This is Slogon, which is slogon’s product location. Thinking of my work over the years, there are two key words that come to my mind.

To reach their goals

So in the tick list tool, what dimensions do I use to plan goals? So I can do it in a more structured way?

The answer is a list, and a list ideally is a quantifiable goal.

For example, if a list can be called “financial management”, then the tasks in the list do not know what to achieve. This list could also be called “Financial Ability to Achieve 10% annualized Return within six months” (random), and the tasks on the list are broken down into smaller and larger goals and completed at a fixed time.

Back in the engineer’s job, we need to find a way to converge the valuable tasks left after the first step of sorting them into our own custom lists.

Of course, being an engineer, we already have some big things that need to be planned, like projects, or long-term routines.

We can take each project as a separate list, and then plan around the project in the list. With the help of the tick list, we can make detailed and intuitive planning, which will be shared in the next section. Close the list at the end of the project.

Besides these routine tasks, what else can you do to demonstrate the power of a checklist and improve your personal skills?

Remember the Future might list, where we were thinking about the status quo, thinking about code, thinking about technology, thinking about what we might be able to push. When we review (and we’ll get to that later) tasks that don’t have time on our list, and we have a sneaking feeling that we can make something better, don’t hesitate to create a new list, give it a fancy name, and start planning

For example, I extracted two goals that I wanted to accomplish, one of which was also my OKR goal

  • Improve the owner consciousness of teaching line partners by 100%
  • Improve monitoring & stability capability

Combined with tick list =>

As a result, the list of tasks is down to single digits, and three of them are mindless lists.

  • Wait for others
  • In the future may
  • To do list
  • Specific projects
  • Improve monitoring & stability capability
  • Improve the owner consciousness of teaching line partners by 100%

TIP

Most of our work is focused on continuous planning around a few goal lists.

Now that you’ve normalized the list, is it time to refactor?

Dilemma 3: The list of ideas and actions is cluttered. Many of them have no deadlines and become a burden on my mind. I always feel like I haven’t done anything

Once you have a list, you have a goal, and then you have a plan. So the list task function corresponds to the third step of GTD — planning.

Tasks, the important thing is executable, only executable tasks are the easiest to digest, how to make the task list whole executable, different list tools can have different methods, the click kanban function really makes my eyes bright… See how I use kanban to plan different lists.

For individual projects:

This is a template I organized, and it is ok to copy it directly for a new project in the future, because the overall process of each project is the same, including various scheme writing, review, code writing, testing and release. According to the project process combined with kanban made a classification, the biggest feeling is intuitive and controllable.

For a push landing purpose list:

The left side is the thinking position, which is my usual thoughts on this goal. Through these thoughts, I can improve the team plan and personal plan. It must take time to fall into the plan, otherwise, I can always lie in the thinking position and come out after I finish thinking.

TIP

There is no right or wrong, there is only one principle: thinking is thinking, planning must have a clear execution time

Dilemma 4: Know the importance of making lists regularly, but how many do you have? 30? How do I organize this?

There is no more reason to review. I believe many people have tried. The dilemma here is that there may be dozens of lists before refactoring.

Those of you who have seen this already know that lists are goals, and once you have more than five goals you can only accomplish them for the gods.

When the list is numbered, it is worth reviewing these important lists.

I think it’s a good time to start writing the weekly. Pick a good half hour and complete the weekly review.

Create a separate list called Weekly View with a few fixed tasks

  • Is the collection box empty
  • What are the lists to do next week
  • Is there anyone you need to talk to (friend, colleague, boss)

Tick Tock has a repetitive task function and is set to be reminded every Friday at 5pm.

Review the drop box and make sure we have all the tasks on our lists. Reviewing lists, organizing plans, and adjusting what you’re doing is a closed loop that organically starts the wheels rolling.

Review the people you want to talk to in order not to be isolated, in order to communicate, but also in order to better survive.

Dilemma 5: With a partially managed job, how can I work with the inventory tool to know what everyone is doing on a macro level so that I can design something from the top

In fact, this part is not a problem on the time management link, but indeed the coordination list can also be done, for example, you are in charge of a business unit, this unit may have three partners to cooperate, we may need to know all the projects in this business unit.

We need lists to help us focus on the key points. Once we understand this usage, we can also create lists to keep track of progress, such as the project progress here.

Also, with the help of kanban function, key milestones of the project can be divided. With the help of tag function, people can be labeled with names, and the progress of the project can be clearly seen.

Similarly, we can create an OKR progress tracking list by managing okR latitude.

If we want to see an overview of someone’s schedule for the week, tick Tock has a calendar feature that filters by TAB specific people and displays them by week and month.

conclusion

With five dilemma descriptions and solutions, we should have a good understanding of the philosophy of GTD and how to get more done with a tick.

Collect, sort => tick of the collection box, list

The collection box is responsible for receiving all needs. Think [waiting for others] [Future possibilities] [to-do list] Manage trivia and customize list management goals

Schedule => tasks in the tick list

Use the Kanban pattern of good lists to help manage tasks

Review => tick list

Separate weekly checklist

Finally, when I go to work every Monday, CLICK the ticking [recent 7 days] list, which will gather the tasks that have been disassembled in each list before and set the date, and adjust the time according to the priority of the task, so that the load of a week is relatively even.

Every morning when you arrive at your desk, click on the ticking “Today” list, where the day’s tasks are aggregated by the date they are unpacked from each list. Take 10 minutes to reprioritize and start focusing.

The most important things to do today are organized, and they are all specific actions. If you do them one by one, you will be able to accomplish both your daily work and the other things you want to do outside of your daily work.