March 15 | 365 Days of Writing Prompts

Comfort zone: What are you more comfortable with — routine and planning, or laissez-faire spontaneity?

I would say that my comfort zone is routine and planning. However, some laissez-faire spontaneity may be good because when everything is well planned, some last-minute changes can screw everything. If you totally dependent on the plan you should consider a “plan b” for some tasks that do not depend only on your decisions. Otherwise, when you lose control will be worse as you don’t are used to it.

I think planning is more than a pristine agenda, it is organization. For me, it is more important to have a sequence of tasks in “order” than everything planned to the minute, there are too many distractions (voluntary and involuntary) that will change these minor deadlines.

When I started my Ph.D., I used a paper agenda, a paper notepad and some TODO lists in paper sheets. For a long time, I replicate the agenda on the Google Calendar just to have mobile notifications — back then Google Calendar sent SMS with notifications, the 3G/4G still was a “myth”. Soon after, I left my notepad because I was not carrying it all the time, so sometimes I would send SMS to me with notes and later add those to the notepad. This was a total waste of time.

I cannot precise when, but then I’ve become aware of Google Keep. I used it on the mobile and laptop, it worked offline, and then I synchronized when wifi was available. Google Keep is great for small note, TODO list, grocery lists, and other memos (save bookmarks, pictures etc).

Just not long ago, I tried Trello. Trello is a TODO list service (available on browser and mobile), it is quite popular, and it worked for a while. However, I think that it is more useful for projects. For example, when I am coding it is great to divide all the small tasks — it is also used for group projects, which I’ve never tried. It has a lot of features that may improve your project management. Moreover, Trello had a “plug-in” to associate the Trello tasks with Pomodoro technique — once again, it was very useful while I was coding a lot.

The main advice I give to you is to choose the best tools that work for you. The best tools are the one that fit your needs. I prefer to keep it simply, the fewer apps, the better, possible to use on the laptop and mobile, alert notification, and simple to use.