Staying motivated and organized with Things 3… and other things.

After month and a half of hitting the gym consistently I came to realize a few things that have to do with discipline, motivation and organization that can be applied to all aspects of our lives.
I’m not going to go into too many details on my healthy habits because that’s for another blog entry. Instead, I would like to tell you my experience organizing my personal as well as my work life.
The first thing -and the most important one- is persistence. And how you achieve persistence, you may ask? Well, I don’t know the scientific answer but I can tell you that by repeating the same action over and over again, even when you really really REALLY don’t want to do it, you interiorize that said action into your day to day life. And that can be anything that you can think of. It could be drinking 5 glasses of water at certain times during the day, or writing a certain number of paragraphs of your next book a day, or designing 1 logo a day, or anything at all.
Now, that’s exactly how you create habits, and yes, persistence creates habits. So that’s the first thing you have to do. But creating habits is not easy. You must start with baby steps. In my case, I never felt like I was a very disciplined person. But a few months ago, I started to take my health a lot more seriously. I was eating very poorly and I would be drained by 5pm after work. When you don’t give your body the good stuff it is expected that you feel the way I did. So I started to include in my daily activities one hour of some sort of workout. Now, Let’s pause for a second and see what we have so far.
First, you acknowledge the problem, then you want to change in order to fix that problem. That’s cool, we are moving forward, but ask yourself something: How many times have you acknowledged the problem and were willing to change it but ended up eating Lay’s chips on a couch watching Youtube? Well, not me ‘cause I don’t really eat Lay’s, but you get the point. So I figured that I needed a third factor in order to help me fix my problem. And that third pilar for me was Excitement. In my case, excitement was the outer factor, or outer motivation if you will, that I needed. Something that got me started or made me want to do what I was imposing myself to do. You can laugh all you want but I went ahead and got myself a new pair of running shoes. The cool ones. The ones that I really wanted to use for running.

So now you have that final outer motivation to start going. And after you start going, you push yourself to repeat the action over and over again.
Now, organizing my life and work was pretty much the same. Baby steps, remember? In my case I acknowledged that there was a plethora of things I wanted to do but I often found myself forgetting or telling myself “I didn’t have time today”. I wanted to change that. And finally around those days, I got an email one morning from Culture Code. They were announcing the launch of Things 3. I thought “Shit, this is my outer motivation”, my excitement.
Downloaded then the iPhone app and started to try it. The user interface was as clean as clean can be. I had used Things 2 before on my iPhone and Mac many years ago and this was definitely a huge leap forward. I never really understood completely how to use Things 2 in the past in order to get the most out of it, but this third version is really user friendly and very straight forward. It includes features that make my life so easier and I want to share with you my favorites.
Calendar integration
Thank God for this feature. Now there’s only one place to see a summary of my day every morning. I use the most fantastic calendar available right now in my opinion for Mac and iOS: Fantastical. And with its natural language input I can set events on my calendar so easily and have them displayed in my “Today” view on Things 3.
Upcoming tasks
With the upcoming view I get easy access to what’s next on my agenda for the upcoming days, weeks, months, etc.
Magic plus
Interactive and omnipresent button that lets me create anything: New tasks into my Inbox, new tasks into my Today window when I’m in it. new tasks on my Upcoming window when I’m there, create Projects, create Areas, Headings within projects, etc.
Alarms or Reminders
Need a notification to let you know when you need to complete a task at a certain time during the day? Or just to let you know about an upcoming task that needs to be taken care of? Things 3 got you covered. And you can also use natural language when you need to assign a date of completion, something I recently discovered.
Checklists within tasks
Hello? Anybody said grocery shopping!?
There are a million more features in this app to help you achieve your goals. The possibilities are limitless and I really recommend you check their website. The only thing for now you can’t do is share tasks. This To-do app is meant to be used by an individual. So if that’s not a deal breaker for you, I suggest you give it a try.
Now remember that the title includes the word “motivated”? Well, here’s the good part. Once you start seeing results, positive ones of course, you get yourself on some sort of motivation streak. Most of the stuff that I have planned for the day has been achieved since I started using Things 3.
And I use it for my personal stuff as well as my work. I’m currently re-designing the employe book with information they need to know when they are hired and so I’m using the Project feature to break it down into several tasks. It’s fantastic!
One more thing that I don’t want to forget to mention is that even the most beautiful and feature-rich to-do app will be useless if you don’t use it or don’t check it constantly. So here’s another tip: Use Things 3 or whichever app you’d like and program repetitive alarms so that you create the habit of checking them. Another thing is that I suggest you keep it in your dock for easy access and make things easier for you. The trick is to put there the tasks as they appear in your head or are being assigned to you by your boss, your co-workers, your boy-girlfriend, etc.

I really hope my experience help you develop habits and achieve constant motivation towards your future projects. Your imagination is the limit!