Writing things whereas saying or hearing them.

Become a human again — II: Decrease your mental charge and get things done.

Forgetting to do things, don’t know how to start something, do not finish nor honor something, etc. Is it your daily lousy routine? So it’s time to learn how to get things done!

Understand the mental charge

As I mentioned in the first part, your brain doesn’t have terabytes of space and can’t store all the things you have planned to do. All this mess is called the mental charge.

Become a human again — I: Stop your RSS feed and social addictions.

“If you just mention or listen to something, it will fly away, and will come back in your mind like a sharp boomerang.”

For instance, mental charge affects households. Think about launching the laundry, think about making an appointment to the dentist for the next few days, remember under the shower that you forgot “pasta” on your shopping list, etc. Did you notice and count how many times you think about something, and how the minute after, it flies away? It’s usually in those moments that you start to feel angry at yourself.

The mental charge is not only at home, but it also increases at any time: “Oh, I have to do it” or “I must have to do it one day”. There are tasks, and there are projects. Specifically, projects are like “I will stop smoking this month” or “I want to write posts on Medium next month”. They are not succeeding because they are too big, and we will learn how to make them successful.

If you just mention or listen to something, it will fly away, and will come back in your mind like a sharp boomerang in your mind: “Oh f**k, I’ve said I had to do this, and I forgot it!”, “I always say it, but I forget it every time!”. I hear it every day, people forget how to deal with this bad habit.

Another silly example is when you say: “Oh, I have to go to the toilet right now!”. Usually, it happens when you are already doing something, like programming or writing something. You don’t do it. Your brain and your body are unconsciously disturbed by this; you are less efficient and less focused. We’ll also see this in the “Part III — Stop multitasking your brain, be focused”. To sum up, it may just take 3 minutes, to move your body and be well after that. It’s the same for everything: when it’s done, you feel better.

So let’s start learning to knock it definitely, in other words:

Just for fun :D

Tips for dealing with the mental charge

“One thing written down is one thing less to think about.”

1. Write it down

If you don’t write things down, you will forget these. 99% of the time.

• First, write something down reinforce the memory.
• Secondly, because watching or reading something repetitively will quickly reactivate your memory.
• Finally, it merely avoids forgetting to think about it.

One thing written down is one thing less to think about. It’s more space and less charge for your brain. Stop saying it, write it down to free your mind, and do it

On paper, on your notes or todo app, or in your reminder app. Some people are efficient at working with paper. I’m pretty impressed about that. I can’t do like that. We are in the 21st century: working with a to-do list app, with alerts or reminders, schedules, and advanced features will be better than just paper. We will learn that after with the Things app.

2. Share it with somebody

Another tip you can apply daily is to say the thing or your engagement to someone, a friend, or a colleague. It works well. You do not have to take people as your reminder, but just detail your goals to them: “Hey John, I’m going to smoke less, from 10 to 5 cigarettes a day starting from today, are you with me?”. And guess what? If your friend is used to seeing you going to your smoke break, he will tell you: “Hey man, you are going to smoke your 6th cigarette today. You just told me not more than 5 yesterday, remember?”. You understand the trick.

3. Apply the GTD Methodology

One last tip is which methodology is used to deal with tasks and projects. There are a lot of methods to get things done, like the good one called the “Pomodoro Technique”. But I’ve tested another one: Getting Things Done. It has the advantage of dealing with the mental charge and your goals quickly:

1. It will make a lot of place in your brain by writing things.
2. It will decrease your stress about forgetting to do something.
3. The most important: be more productive to achieve your priority goals.

It’s this method that we will learn here in detail, with examples and tools. So, are you ready?

Write something, with a pen or with a computer-keyboard, is the best thing to remember, do and achieve things — Credits

Getting Things Done in details

David Allen introduced the methodology in his best-seller called “Getting things done, the art of stress-free productivity.” I advise you to read the book to understand how it works perfectly. I will focus here on the main details.

What is a “priority”?

To understand the concept of GTD, you must remember that the task itself does not orient the priority of itself. The priority changes each day. There are a lot of interruptions, factors, and it’s your interpretation of priority.

To decide if the moment is right to start a task, you have to ask yourself four questions:

• 1- Is the context is good? The context and the power of the environment, the tools required to do it.
• 2- Have I the time to do this? You have to establish the durability of the task, the deadline, and if it can be split with subtasks.
• 3- Have I the energy? You possibly can’t do it today, like doing some sport whereas you have to rest because of a rheum.
• 4- What is the highest priority task? Finally, after the 3 questions below, which task is more important than another?

Now, you know what to ask before dealing with a task. You going to be sure that the task is urgent, this task is useful, or this thing is secondary.

The workflow

To apply GTD, there is a workflow to keep in mind. Here it is:

Cheat-sheet of GTD methodology — Source

You may think that it will be challenging to apply this schema below, but in practice, it’s pretty simple. I advise you not to learn it perfectly. The primary flow and the logic are essential. Here are the details with an example:

1. The big stuff is coming to you. You or your colleague say: “Hey, can you call the client about having information on this document?”. Ok. It’s time to write it down in your task inbox.
2. What do I have to do? Here are the keywords: call, the client, information, document. Ok. I have a phone, the client phone number, and I understand what we are talking. The context and the environment are right.
3. I classified it in the project “Calls”.
4. How many times will it take? It depends on the subject. More or less than 2 minutes? If it is, do it now. If not, defer and schedule it. If you can’t do it yourself because you don’t have the legitimacy to call the client: delegate it. Delegation is not dangerous when a legitim person can better do the thing.
5. I did it.

Did you see the four steps before the final one “Do it”? Don’t be a machine by eating all tasks that colleagues or yourself are giving to you. So be careful, don’t do things like the FIFO concept. It’s not the point. It’s not efficient. You don’t have to deal with all tasks instantly.

Vocabulary

Here is a reminder of the GTD vocabulary that you have to keep in mind:

Inbox: it’s the entry point. Each time you think about something, each time someone tells you to do something, or asks you to think about something, write it down in your inbox. Remember that your inbox is your brain’s best friend. Regularly check the inbox to classify and sort your incoming tasks.

Today: it’s your tasks of the day. The goal is to kick them all. Limit yourself to 3 tasks max at work and 3 max tasks in your personal life. If you put more tasks in a day, you will have the stress about seeing all of them during the day, you will be disturbed. Most of the time, the other tasks you think about have a lower priority. Re-schedule them.

Maybe one day: you do not have to do things each day, or the next days. It could be a long project, a shallow priority project or a dream to realize. For instance, “Visit New Zealand” is a project that has to be done “one day”. To stop thinking about it and missing it each year, write it down. Classify it in the schedule “one day” in the project “Trips”. I like the trips category, to note trips, of course, weekends and museums to visit one day.

Task: the things. It can be a call to do, an appointment to schedule, a software feature to develop, or a t-shirt to buy for your brother’s birthday. Anything.

Project: all tasks belong to a project or a category. It can be called “Shopping”, “Trips”, “Client project A” or “Less than 2min tasks”.

Domain: It’s where your projects belong to. It can just be your personal life or your work.

The routine

Writing and classifying tasks to do are the basics. To be efficient, you have to apply the routine of reading them regularly. It’s the key.

At the end of each day, read your “today list” and your Inbox to classify or schedule tasks. Before the next day or before going to sleep, read the incoming tasks to be prepared and not forget something the next morning.

Work projects and personal projects are the same. They represent a sum of small tasks to achieve the project itself.

Think short to deal with bigger gradually

Before doing something, you must understand how to schedule and deal with a big project or task.

“I will be going to wake up at 6 am instead of 8 am starting tomorrow!”.

Well, good luck.

You may survive a week, but you will fail quickly. I’ve tried it. Big failure. Why will you fail as I did? Because you have decided to climb a huge step, the goal itself. It’s too big, too quick, and brutal. Let’s continue with this example to understand the final trick.

“Harder is the step, more difficult is the way to deal with it.”

As I’ve mentioned it in the introduction, step-by-step is the key. With our example, the goal is to wake up at 6 am instead of 8 am, each morning. It’s a gap of two hours according to your habits. And guess what? Your body is not elastic. It’s like your brain. You have to practice and make progressive achievements to change it.

To deal with our new morning habit, here are the steps to think about:

1. Ok, so “I want to wake up 2 hours earlier”.
2. It’s equal to 120 minutes.
3. For instance, I can wake up 2 minutes earlier each morning.
4. It seems better, because 2min/day during 60 mornings, will give me the goal of 2 hours in the end.
5. So, for tomorrow, I will set my alarm clock to 7:58 am. Not 8 am.

And the day after, 2 min less and 2 min before for bedtime. Now you will succeed. Of course it will depend if you are a morning or a let person :)

It’s the same thing as stopping smoking: 1 cigarette less per day during a week, next 2, next 3, etc. Remember that the harder is the step, the more difficult the way to deal with it.

To experiment it, I’ve decided to write one part per week of “Become a human again”. Seriously, it was tough. One part/month first could be better, then every 3 weeks, finally every two weeks, etc. Firstly, I have decided to write it in English, not French (my native language). Secondly, I need English corrections from my friends. Finally, the priority of writing those posts changes according to my energy and motivation during the week. As I said before, the priority changes and depends on many factors.

So when you put a task in your inbox, be sure it’s not a macro-task and split it into different ordered parts. Next, place the task into a specific project where the task belongs and decide on realistic scheduling.

“Things” is probably the best app ever made to deal with the GTD method

Now that we know what the definition of a priority is, how to deal and think about doing things, it’s time to have a great tool to help you, especially your brain.

Why use an app?

We live in a connected world. Yes, technology is predominant. Yes, it kills humanity and jobs sometimes, but technology always responds to an issue. I’ve tested writing my tasks on paper, but it’s definitely not working. I’ve changed in favor of a classic notes app, it was the same.

Applications could be better than paper: they offer you reminders, synchronization between devices, advanced tasks organization, etc. You write on a computer or a smartphone more quickly and more efficiently than with a pen.

Next, I started to use Wunderlist, which have been acquired by Microsoft. In 2017, I discovered a good one, which has the best name to deal with GTD: Things.

Why “Things”?

Things 3 — For iOS

There are a lot of apps, like Todoist and Microsoft To-Do. I’ve tested them, but trust me, Things is muchbetter. It will change your life… or not 😅. Because it’s expansive and it’s only working on Apple devices. Things has a reliable business model, so you have to buy it once for the iPhone, rebuy it for the iPad version and finally buy it on macOS. Ouch’ 💸.

I’ve bought the iPhone and the macOS versions. It’s synchronized in the cloud. So, expansive yes, but the Things team has done excellent work on it, the app and the Things team deserves it. Please note that they received an Apple Design Award in 2017.

Let’s go to present you Things. I put right down here a screenshot of my Things configuration (in French):

Yes, I’ve written down to buy brown sockets 😅, but I will not forget it!

• A: The default Things / GTD zone. You have the inbox, today tasks (here on the right), incoming tasks, tasks history, and trash.
• B: Your domains and project zone. Here I have “Smart&Soft” (my company) and “Perso”, which contains tasks of my personal life. Each domain has projects, like my current one “LCI” at work. Or you can define categories, like “Under 2 minutes”, “Christmas” (gift list 🤗) or “Trips”.
• C: The selected project zone. For the “⭐️ Today” part, it will display each project titles with their tasks scheduled for today, not others. Pretty efficient.

Here are some other features that Things offers:

• Notes, files, and links for tasks.
• Sub-tasks.
• Scheduling. “One day”, or if it’s “Today” you can be precise it with “Tonight”. You can set up notifications and alerts for a specific hour.
• Repeat: You can decide the repetition of a task: weekly, monthly, yearly, every two days, etc. It’s very advanced.
• Deadline: If a date is not efficient or secure enough to you, you can decide on a deadline.
• Convert a task to a project.
• The small circles remind you the progress of your projects.
• I stop here. There is a lot to say. Just test it, you will enjoy Things :)

Here an example of a trip planning. The star icon represents a task that you have to do today, the moon icon is for tonight. The user interface is just perfect — Source

Keep in mind that if a task was not resolved yesterday, it will appear in the “Today” list, in front of you. It will reinforce you to deal with it, or re-schedule it.

Things proposes advanced task specifications, with sub-tasks, notes, files, links, and scheduling. Here a screenshot of an example:

The definition of simplicity and efficiency by design.

As you probably have noticed it, the interface is pure, efficient and precise. You don’t have to deal with sophisticated features. I have been using it for years, and I can’t switch to another solution.

To go further with Things, here are some tips I used to be more efficient with it:

• Use Emojis in front of categories to distinguish them. It’s pretty useful for your eyes and universal: I don’t have to translate my french projects on the previous capture, I think you have understood them with emojis.
• Use time-oriented category, “under 2min”, “under 30min” or “under 1 hour” to easily know at which moment you will schedule them. 2023 update: I finally dropped these categories and only focused on projects & domains, but no time.
• Distinguish my work and my personal life with two specific domains. It’s important not to be tempted by work projects mixed with personal ones. Moreover, Things offers you the tags feature, to tag a task in “Work”, “In progress” or “Personal” for instance.

After all this configuration and organization, coupled to the GTD workflow, you will experience something when you will check a task checkbox: a big satisfaction feeling.

I will not describe you Things in all the details, just test it and practice with it. I think that with only those screenshots, you already have a good picture of what it offers. I’m not here to promote Things, if you don’t want Things to apply GTD, try another solution (Todoist is good too). It’s your choice, your money, and your brain.

Before getting things done

I hope you have learned some tips, tools, and principles to deal with things to do and decrease your mental charge.

How about you? What are your best tips or practices for tackling a task or project? Which method do you apply every day? Do you have an issue you want to share with us?

Now that you are prepared to deal with tasks, you have to learn how to stop multitasking your brain and be focused all day.

That’s what we will see in the next post, “Part III — Stop multitasking your brain, be focused.”.

Become a human again — III: Stop multitasking your brain, be focused.

If you are still here: thank you 🍻.