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January 04, 2006

How to handle daily actions

I received an email from a participant in one of my recent seminars who asked:

How you organize your daily to-do's that need action the same day?

If I have an action that must be taken today, but can be done anytime today, I will add it as an All Day Event. In Outlook, this should keep the time as free for group scheduling purposes. For Lotus Notes users, by default an All Day Event will show your entire day as busy, so choose Anniversary instead and change the range of days under Repeats (can even be the same start and end day).

Each morning, the first place I look is today's calendar page. I look at anything with a start/end time and then I scan to the untimed All Day Events. I am very careful about adding things to the Calendar so that I don't get caught with my calendar full of nice-to-do things that don't get done because I needed to handle unexpected stuff as it showed up (and hence having to copy it on to the next day which takes time and usually is a negative reinforcer). But for those must do daily actions, I think the calendar can be a great reminder system.

I like to follow the guideline of:

- if it needs to be done ON a particular day, I put it on the calendar (as an appointment or all day event)
- if it needs to be done BY a particular day, but can be done any day up to the day, I put it on the Action list for where I need to be to take the action (office, computer, call etc.)

Posted by Kelly at January 4, 2006 02:18 PM