Friday, February 23, 2018

Some tips to manage tasks

WRITING AND PHOTOS BY MONIKA CSAPO





"Being busy isn't the same as being effective."

This week I watched two very useful courses about time management on Skillshare. One was made by the founder of Skillshare and is called "Productivity: Create Your Ideal Week". The other was made by Taylor Conophy and the tite is: "Organizing Your Life: Time Management".

Each of us have their strenghts and weaknesses. I am for example usually very creative when it comes to new ideas but am not so effective when it comes to realizing them. Therefore courses which help you to get more disciplined and productive are always welcome!

Some insights I wrote down while listening to the courses were:

1. Start small. Simplicity + Consistency = Productivity

2. Blocked Time and Calendaring
Find out when you are most effective throughout the day. Reserve these hours as blocked time for focused work every day. Log out from all apps and tell also others that you want to focus and will not be available during this time.

3. The Rule of 3
Set three priorities for the week, three priorities (tasks) for the day and three wins for the week. Start on Monday with sketching a weekly plan based on this method what you will review on Friday.

4. Organize your daily to-do list by effort size.

5. Coordinating with others.
Make others understand what type of goals you want to achieve and let them know how they can help you.

6. Context- switching: multi tasking isn't effective. 
Why are you switching context? Are you bored? Is your computer loading too slow? (emptying some space will help). Try to find solutions to eliminate your distractions.

7. Bookmarking
To prevent context-switching you can bookmark interesting articles for reading later. For example you can spend your Saturday morning or the evenings with following up on those articles.

8. Emails
Check-in frequency (every 1/2/4 hours), use pause-apps if you do not want to be disturbed for a while.

9. Keeping track of new habits.
Habit Bull is a great app for tracking your success with new habits. It is free for up to tracking five habits. You can mark each succesful day in your app calendar and see your progress in a visual format.

10. Breaking The Rules
It is ok breaking the rules. Recharge if needed, go for a walk if you need some fresh air. Sometimes keeping distance helps to figure out problems faster. Living a heatlhy lifestyle helps to stay focused (sleep well, drink enough water, exercise, relax mentally every day..)

I also bought three notebooks each for different tasks. In one I am keeping a food diary, in the second I write my notes of Skillshare courses and the third is a diary for my flower photography. 

One of the photos I took of my new notebooks got even reposted on Pigna's official instagram page. I was so happy!  If you want your work to be seen and shared I can recommend you to use tagging because sometimes companies, restaurants, hotels and hostels and general tourist sights really do check their tags on social media actively.

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