people, systems and design: October 2004 Archives

About 15 months ago I wrote about how I managed my personal todo lists, via bits of paper inside my moleskine. Since then I have taken this approach and extended it to work to do lists too. It is kind of like the 43folders idea, but expressed in a different manner around task mangement.

I have a job in which I need to satisfy the needs of a range of clients and often walk from one meeting straight into the next. Usually generating reams of notes in the process, or lots of text in SubEthaEdit etc. I guess this sounds familiar ?

So, rather than bury my tasks inside the pages of my notebook, I put them on three bits of the larger post-it pad, see photo. Why three, the first two capture what I need to get done, the third is for overspill, when I have not had time to consolidate tasks from the first two. I put the post-it sheets on the inside front cover of the A5 notebook, which I use for note-making.

There is no order to the list, it is just a list of things to do, two pages keeps things to about 20 tasks, trying to subdivide these into categories is a waste of time, things are often too fluid for this to work and there are only 20 tasks. Some prioritization is useful, an asterisk usually suffices. See Paul Hammond on why more than 20 is bad.

Why does this work? It keeps a current, easily replaceable, list of things to do in a fixed location. Thus I always have to hand the next task to complete and so avoid the endless email checking; coffee-making etc distraction tasks that many of us are prone to.

There are some drawbacks, this strategy can lead to action led, short term thinking, so a background set of tasks framing what you need to do over the course of the next month is useful. A hidden advantage is that you have a list of tasks to hand for weekly reports or other audit tasks.

I've been doing this for personal tasks for about 18 months and for work for about a month or so, it works and I feel more on top of my smaller tasks. It is a very minor life hack. Try it and see how you like it, it doesn't cost much to implement.

I was initially quite impressed with the London Film Festival website (lff), that was until I tried to buy tickets from their tickets site.

The normal website has a simple and effective planner facility, it works and you can build up a daily list of those films you want to see from the 280 available. You need to register to use it, which is fine, so that they can identify you. A small semblance of worry rises when the planner has no obvious link to buy the tickets on your plan. However the true horror is not apparent until you try to actually buy the tickets on your carefully crafted schedule.

The festival site with the programme and the ticket purchase site are built by two separate companies and there is NO integration between them, save some visual elements. Not only that, but they have different registration systems and do not clearly state this, which given the common visual look is unforgivable. You need to create a separate identity to actually buy tickets from the LFF site and you cannot import the plan you have made.

Each film must be selected again individually, also the ticket selection system tells you that you have selected to book two tickets, you click next and are told that you have selected no tickets, as the drop down at the bottom also needs to be set to two, regardless of the information onscreen.

Lastly, the registration on the non-secure site emails you a password to login with, thus at least verifying that you are who you claim to have the email address for. The secure site just emails you and takes you straight to the entry screen for your credit card details, there is no verification of identity, save billing address for your credit card.

Thus the clever and elegant planner is useless, the simple process of linking planning to purchase was obviously too complex, as they had managed to commission two companies to build their single site. Inept is the word that springs to mind.

I hope the festival does well, it was great fun last year, but they really need to try a bit harder with the website offering.