Organization is the key to efficiency. And while I am fortunate to have a great memory that retains a lot of useful (and useless!) information, having to juggle a lot of remembering of all-the-things takes up brain space that could be better used for creative thinking.
I still remember when I first realized I couldn’t just remember everything on my schedule anymore - I had missed a work meeting and was mortified. I had always kept my schedule and everything else just in my head, but I immediately went out and purchased a Day-Timer - a paper scheduling and organization system roughly the size and weight of the Yellow Pages. Okay, with those two references clearly this was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth…
My whole LIFE was in that Day Timer and my very swank blackberry phone. I once left my day-timer on the roof of my car and drove off - before I had time to panic, I got a call from a kind contractor who had found it on the side of the road and made arrangements to get it back to me - thank you God!
These days with the joys of technology, iphones, and cloud based computing, the idea of all that paper seems vaguely Victorian! There are MUCH more efficient systems available now, and I have tried a lot of them!
But the latest darling I’ve discovered, I just had to share, because I think it is so useful for ANYONE juggling multiple responsibilities or even multiple ideas - from students, to stay-at-home parents, to anyone with a job plus other interests.
Not to be confused with the social media platform Tiktok, Tick Tick is a to do list app. Their website says: “We lucubrate in the realm of time, empowering everyone the ability and peacefulness to stay organized, stay creative.” Hmmm…Their marketing could use some work…I had to look up the word lucubrate?! (Shed new light on a subject usually through study or scholarly writing. You’re welcome.) But that notwithstanding, the app is great! And their logo is totally on point.
I was introduced to it by my daughter who prizes efficiency and has the patience to leverage technology to achieve it. She has been extolling the virtues of Tick Tick to me for months, and drowning in a sea of scattered lists I finally caved. She set it up and showed me the basics last weekend and I was off and running! I highly recommend growing your own Millennial, BTW. It is really terrific to have in-house tech support at the moment :), but Tick Tick is pretty intuitive anyway. It runs on both IOS and Android and is cloud based so syncs across all my devices.
Like many people, my life is complicated and my days and associated tasks are wildly varied. I’m always juggling what feels like a million things and worry about dropping a ball somewhere along the line. I’ve been down the organization road many times before and I love lists - there is something SO satisfying about checking off boxes of tasks completed!
I’ve used paper - I adore all things paper and stationary and notebooks and fountain pens - but maintaining paper lists and the redundancy of writing recurring tasks over and over on a daily to do list make these very inefficient - at least for me.
I was a devotee of the Evernote app because it synced across platforms and allowed you to categorize lists into notebooks, but I found I was using it mostly for making shopping lists as it doesn’t have any sort of calendar feature. I’ve tried to sort through using Trello and Asana which have better work flow timeline capabilities, but they are both more cumbersome than I want or need.
I find Tick Tick to be the perfect middle ground, both efficient and useful. I can assign specific tasks and subtasks to particular dates if desired. The app is free, but with the very inexpensive paid version I can have as many lists as I want and integrate them with my preferred calendar app.
It allows me to schedule recurring tasks for any regular or custom times - I can put in reminders for when to pay specific bills and when to change the water filter. I have a clients folder with task lists for each of my current clients, I have an admin list, a biz development list, a blogging list, a domestic list, etc…and a today, and tomorrow, and this week list that they all automatically feed into so I can see what tasks I have scheduled for a particular day.
Or I can go look at a particular list when I have extra time and see any general tasks without specific due dates that I didn’t want to forget…like repair curtain finial in bedroom, and take coat to the tailor. Having them out of my brain and collected in an organized easy to access location is so freeing!
Every time I think of something I want to get to eventually, or need to do, I can just add it to a list - and I can always assign anything a calendar time at any point.
Tasks assigned for today that don’t get completed show up at the top of tomorrow and each day after until they are checked off….a sort of polite version of nagging! Some other features that come with Tick Tick are the ability to give a task a percentage completed if it isn’t totally finished, and integrated focus features for time management like stopwatch and pomodoro timer.
It has plenty of other features too - habits, tags, sorting, priority, reminders, smart lists, voice input, and many more I haven’t fully explored, but for right now, I’m delighted to just free up some brain space!
Oh, and there are STILL boxes to check off - I love that!
