Many of the task list antipatterns I see in my own system involve some form of "information blindness". What I need to be working on gets obscured by the volume of data being managed. One of the most depressing of these is "Overdue Blues". I get back from a brutal trip and see a "sea of red" on my task list from the overdue items. I lose motivation and start operating from my e-mail inbox instead of my task list, or from memory, to avoid the mess.
I generally have found that Overdue Blues is easily overcome. I'm usually on a day or two worth of work behind and can easily catch up if I bear down. I've found a couple motivational tricks that help.
- Renegotiate with myself. I run through the task list, find all the overdue next actions where I own the deliverable and ask permission of myself to move this action. This reduces the amount of red I see and helps give me a sense of progress and hope that I can get caught up quickly.
- Burn my quality time. I have grown quite sensitive to my internal rythems and habits. I know when I am most productive and when I am not. Generally, I reserve the most productive time for a large, hard or creatively challenging task. If I am suffering from Overdue Blues, often I will sacrifice the next highly productive period knocking out a large number of smaller overdue tasks. This gets me back to a manageable system and makes me feel better about the overall task of catching up.
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