It took me almost a year to write it. I’ve put a lot of effort into it, and I am very happy with the result.

Bill Polm, one of the early readers, who also helped me with editing, predicted that the “[The] book has the potential for becoming a classic in the field. It covers [task] management better than any I have read before it“.

We’ve not even announced it yet, and several people have already purchased it! This is very exciting.

I plan to keep improving the e-book, based on the feedback I will receive. Updates of the e-book will be free.

You might have a lot of questions – so I will do my best to answer them. If you have any other questions, post it in the comments.

Who is Swift Mind Freedom for?

Swift Mind Freedom is for anyone who has a lot of things to do or keep track of, and works with a Windows computer.

If you use or would like to use Swift To-Do List, it’s perfect for you.

What will I gain from Swift Mind Freedom?

As you start applying Swift Mind Freedom, you will:

1. Experience instant and complete relief from stress and overwhelm.
2. Get in total control of your work and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
3. Become super-efficient, racing through your surprisingly motivating to-do list in record time.

The results are permanent. Once you read this e-book, your to-do lists will never be the same.

What are the contents?

The e-book has 3 main sections:

• Introduction and motivation – this helps you understand why being organized is important, and it gets you moving. I also share the story of my personal “to-do list journey”.
• 11 Swift Mind Freedom Principles – these 11 powerful principles are the core. Each principle comes with a fun hand-drawn illustration, and an action step so you can immediately apply it into your life
• Q&A and Troubleshooting – this section lists many questions and problems, along with the answers.

Each section is divided into chapters.

It has 110 pages in total.

It comes as a PDF file, so you can read it on your computer, table or e-reader.

(In the future, I would like offer .mobi and .epub formats as well if there is interest.)

If you would like a short sample, see my recent post “Tasks and oranges“. That post explains why it’s important to break down complex tasks into subtasks. In Swift Mind Freedom, there is a whole chapter about this (it is one of the Principles), including a how-to and step-by-step instructions for Swift To-Do List.

How does Swift Mind Freedom compare to other books?

This e-book is unique because it shows you how to apply what you learn directly in Swift To-Do List.

Also, it is easy, fast and simple. It is possible to read and apply it in a single day.

I’ve read all the books on task management, time management, organizing and productivity I could find, and after a lot of research, experiments and hard work, I’ve distilled them into Swift Mind Freedom, so you can get great results fast and with minimum effort.

Each of the 11 core principles comes with a fun hand-drawn illustration. This helps you understand and remember better, and learn faster.

Finally, I am here for you. I am committed to helping you get the results you want, so you can email me at any time with your questions.

How much does it cost?

The e-book costs $39.95.

If you purchase it with a new Swift To-Do List 8 for Windows license, you will get 50% discount.

Purchasing this book is 100% risk-free for you, because it comes with 90-day money back guarantee. If you won’t be completely happy with it for any reason, I will refund you the full amount. No hard feelings. Again, I am fully committed to helping you get the results you want.

Where can I purchase the book?

Right now, it is available exclusively on our website, where you can purchase it using our secure online store.

You will receive it immediately after payment.

Will there be a sequel?

Yes, I would like to write a sequel.

Swift Mind Freedom is focused mostly on getting and staying organized, stress relief, control and efficiency. It works beautifully with Swift To-Do List.

The sequel will be heavily focused on productivity. It will build upon Swift Mind Freedom (getting organized is always the first and most important step). My working title for the sequel is “Ultra Productive: Eat your to-do list“.

I love feedback!

I would love to hear what you think. If you read the book, please send me an email and tell me what you think. What you loved and what you didn’t care for. While I know that Swift Mind Freedom is already pretty good, your feedback can help me improve it further.

Any questions or thoughts? Post them in comments below!

Related Posts:

• How to keep your to-do list useful, short and motivating
• How to murder your productivity
• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?
• Always get stuff out of your head
• “Why should I care about being organized?”
• Centralize Your Lists with Swift To-Do List

Swift Mind Freedom released! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

A quick recap -

1. Create the to-do list and do the initial dump, placing all your “stuff” into it. This clears your mind.
2. (continuously): Look at your to-do list, see what’s next, work on it.
   » Whenever you get interrupted or distracted, repeat.
   » Whenever you finish a task, repeat.
3. (continuously): Whenever a new idea or task comes to you, write it down immediately into your to-do list, then proceed with what you were doing before.

Today, we will add one important advanced technique. It is the missing secret ingredient.

We are going to learn a solid to-do list maintenance routine, using which you will keep your to-do list relevant, short and motivating.

Your to-do list is like a garden.

If you don’t tend a garden, it will soon become full of weeds and dead plants. The beautiful flowers and useful plants will have hard time flourishing in such an environment, as they become oppressed by the weeds.

The same thing can happen to your to-do list. If you don’t remove done tasks, and if you don’t remove tasks that are no longer important, and if you don’t reprioritize tasks when priorities change, your to-do list will be just like a garden full of weeds; and not nearly as useful as it could be.

1. Reprioritize. When your to-do list becomes an obstacle to your productivity, it’s usually because there are too many tasks in certain priority categories. Usually, you will have far too many high priority tasks. So, demote some of them. Ask yourself: What is really important here?Keep in mind that tasks lose importance over time. There are two main reasons for this. First, in the moment you are writing a task down, it usually seems emotionally more important than a few days later when the emotion fades away. Second, some newer tasks are indeed more important than the old tasks, so the old tasks lose relevance because of the opportunity cost. As you know, you can’t do everything.

   The problem is that we seldom decrease priorities of tasks in our to-do lists. For many of us, it just feels wrong – it feels like slacking. But reprioritizing is necessity to keep your to-do list relevant and up-to-date. Things change, and your to-do list must reflect that.

2. Delete everything that is no longer important. Sometimes you might realize that you don’t want to do something at all, because things changed. That’s perfectly OK. You can never do it all. You have just so much time. If you are sure you don’t want to do something, delete it. If you are unsure, then reprioritize it accordingly – as an “Info/Maybe” task, and perhaps move it to a separate list. Try to keep your main to-do list for tasks that absolutely want to do.
3. Hide tasks that you don’t have to worry about now for later. To keep your list at a reasonable size, hide low-priority tasks until later. If you know that you don’t have to worry about something for a couple of weeks or even months, hide it until a later date. In Swift To-Do List, this can be easily accomplished by setting the Hide Until field, added in version 8.
4. Move all non-tasks to a separate list. Your main to-do list should be for actions only (tasks). Keep the non-tasks (info, ideas, reference material) in a separate list; otherwise, it will be impossible to finish your to-do list.
5. Break complex fear-inducing tasks down into sub-tasks. If there are any important task you are procrastinating on, then you should break them down into subtasks.
6. Remove duplicate entries. If you notice the same item appearing twice or more, perhaps in slightly different words, delete all but 1 copy.
7. Rewrite task names to make them more actionable. Use verbs and be specific. When you read any task name, you should immediately know what needs to be done. If you have to think even for seconds, then the task name is probably wrong. You can also spice things up and include fun words and phrases – but be careful to preserve the full clarity. If you can make daunting task rhyme, you might be able to do it sooner, as it will stick in your mind. Play with it. Just don’t overdo this step – it might be a sign of procrastination.
8. Remove projects and goals, and replace them with next action tasks. If your to-do list contains enormous tasks which are not really tasks but projects or goals, you should instead create the next action task (or a couple of them) for each project, and remove the projects from your to-do list. Keep the list of projects separately.
9. Delete completed tasks. Delete them permanently or archive them. In Swift To-Do List, deleted tasks are automatically moved to task Archive, accessible via menu Manage – Archived Tasks. You don’t actually need to do this manually. I recommend you to use the auto-archive feature added in Swift To-Do List 8: Go to menu File – Options, and in the Task-View tab of the Options window, check “Automatically archive done tasks” at the bottom. Using this, done tasks will get automatically archived after the specified time (Immediately, The next day, After 2 days, etc.)

To sum it up: Reprioritize; delete tasks that you no longer want to do; hide all the tasks that are of no concern to you now until later; move all non-tasks to a separate list; break complex tasks into subtasks; delete duplicate tasks; rewrite task names to make them more actionable and specific; remove projects/goals and replace them with next action tasks; delete completed tasks.

If you do this, your to-do list will stay fresh, crisp, laser-focused and super-useful. It will help you flourish.

There is also a second huge benefit to this: By maintaining your to-do list, you will also effectively review it, and maintain a pretty accurate picture of what needs to be done. Your mental model of tasks, non-tasks, project, goals and commitments will very closely reflect the actual information captured in your personal organizer, thus helping you to make better decisions and estimates. By keeping an accurate mental picture, it will also help you avoid capturing the identical information multiple times (thus creating duplicates).

You might now be thinking: “Whoa, I thought that the point of keeping a to-do list is NOT to have things on mind. Well, you are spot on. But what we are trying to do is to make sure that you don’t NEED to keep things in your head, because they are already captured in a trusted organizer. It is the “necessity to remember” which is stressful. Looking at your list and getting the feel of what’s there is not the same as having to remember it all.

When you are reviewing/maintaining your to-do list, your goal is not to memorize it all. The fact that you refresh your mental picture is a side-effect. You are not trying to remember things here, just as when you read a novel, you are not trying to remember it. When you review items in your organizer, it will refresh your mental model of what needs to be done, which is usually beneficial. It helps you make better decisions.

Finally, there is a third enormous benefit. In Agile methodology (used for software development), there is a saying: “If something is painful, do it more often”. If you do the to-do list maintenance just twice a year, it will be very tedious and painful. But if you do it weekly, you will oftentimes notice that many of the steps aren’t even necessary. You will learn to apply these principles automatically, even when you are not doing the routine – this is an incredible benefit. You will become a to-do list master without even trying!

And by the way, many productivity systems have separate maintenance and review routines, or lack one or the other. I’ve combined both review and maintenance routines into one for maximum efficiency, and threw out everything non-essential. Therefore, doing the routine is time extremely well spent with enormous leverage.

Implement regular to-do list maintenance routine into your life, now

I recommend doing the to-do list maintenance routine at least once a week. I think that doing it on Monday morning is perfect, because it will help you review everything that needs to be done during the week, and it will also ensure that you are well-equipped for the week with an actualized and useful to-do list.

But beware – the strategy “I have to remember to do X” (e.g. “I have to remember to do the weekly to-do list maintenance/review”) is a guaranteed failure. Why? You won’t remember it at the right moment. You will be busy; other things will usurp your attention. Even worse, having to remember something is a stressful burden. And each time you fail/skip, you will feel bad about yourself. Don’t do this to yourself! Setup a weekly reminder, and forget it. When it reminds you, do the routine. It’s that simple, and it’s nearly miraculous.

Because merely trying to remember to do the to-do list maintenance routine is a horrible strategy guaranteed to fail, I want you to do the following in Swift To-Do List for Windows:

1. Click the Add Task button. We will create a new task specifically for this.
2. Name the task “Do the weekly to-do list review/maintenance routine”. I also recommend including “- no matter what” at the end of the task name. It’s a little note which tells you that you really, really want to do the routine, even if you might not be feeling like it in the moment. The “- no matter what” appendix works great for me, but something else might work better for you, depending on your personality, self-talk, and preferences.
3. Now go to the Notes tab. What we want to do here is to write step-by-step instructions for doing the routine. Every time you are reminded, the notes with these instructions will be shown. This way, you won’t have to refer to this post. You will also learn the routine faster and do it the right way. And the best part is – doing the routine won’t be as overwhelming, because the steps will be simple and obvious. You won’t procrastinate on this. If you want, you can also include a couple of motivational sentences, reminding yourself why you want to do the routine and how it serves you. Think of this as a message you can send yourself into the future. Right now, you are all enthusiastic and energized about this, but in a few months or weeks, you might feel different, because there can be several important deadlines looming, etc. So – copy the following text into the Notes, and modify it as you see fit. You can also highlight the steps which you think will have the best payoff for you personally.
   

   Go through all tasks – it’s easy! And -
   1) Reprioritize (priorities decrease over time!)
   2) Delete tasks that I no longer want to do
   3) Hide Until later all the tasks that are of no concern to me now
   4) Move all non-tasks to a separate list
   5) Break down intimidating complex tasks into subtasks
   6) Delete duplicates
   7) Rewrite task names to make them more actionable and specific
   8) Remove projects/goals and replace them with next action tasks

4. Now it’s time to go to the Recurrence tab and setup a weekly reminder for this task. Select Recur Weekly, and then set a time. I recommend setting it bit earlier than the usual time you arrive at work, so the reminder immediately pops out. So, for example, if you usually arrive at work at 9:00, set the time to 8:30. Then, check Monday. In the Action dropdown, select “Set undone and remind me”, and optionally, for extra punch, check “Email me”. And that’s it. You can also click the Preview to see the times you will be reminded to do the weekly review. If all looks good, click OK to add this task. Once added, you can check off the task (mark it done), because on Monday, it will uncheck itself and remind you to do the review.

Now, once the reminder-task is set up, go through the steps and actually do the routine right now! This will help you do it well the next time.

Congratulations! You are now ahead of 99% of people who want to get organized, because you have actually made sure that you will succeed. This what true winners do.

The next week, when you are reminded about your to-do list maintenance routine, do it – no matter what.

At first, this might seem tedious, but it will get easier every week. And who knows – after a few months, you might realize that you all you have to do each week is to read your list to refresh the tasks in your mind, because you apply the principles automatically during the week, like a true to-do list master.

Related Posts:

• Swift Mind Freedom released!
• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?
• Is your to-do list impossible to finish?
• Always get stuff out of your head
• 3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating
• How to separate work and personal tasks

How to keep your to-do list useful, short and motivating is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

One Minute To-Do List method is perfect for people who want to quickly start using some proven organizing system, instead of doing things haphazardly and randomly on their own, or learning some complex organizing system.

One Minute To-Do List approach is very simple compared to both GTD and “Master Your Workday Now”. And since it is so simple, I will explain it to you – along with some of my own insights and remarks – and show you exactly how to use it with Swift To-Do List.

Once you read this this post, you will:

1. Learn the proven One Minute To-Do List method
2. Know exactly how to use it with Swift To-Do List for Windows

But what this really means to you is that you will get your workday and life under control and bring intelligent system into your to-do lists. Your to-do lists will finally help you to eliminate stress, not add to it!

I’m so glad that Michael Linenberger developed this simple method that I can now teach to you. Sure, perhaps the method could be even little bit simpler, but I believe that anything simpler probably wouldn’t work. This is as simple as it gets. Do you know the 80/20 principle? 20% of the effort will bring you 80% results – and that’s exactly what One Minute To-Do List is about.

Michael is a truly brilliant guy. This method is backed up by a real-world experience of him as a very successful coach, seminar organizer and best-selling author, who has helped 10.000s of individuals to eliminate stress and become organized. It really works, and it is proven. Michael trains employees of Microsoft, GE, GE, US Coast Guard, and other organizations. And I really believe that you can reap the 80% benefits of his expertise by learning this simple method.

We will cover 4 areas here: Prioritizing Tasks, Capturing Tasks, Reviewing Tasks, and Keeping the List Reasonable. Feel free to skip the “Why this works” box for each area, although the boxes can provide you with better understanding.

You can start using this method today. Just follow the instructions. Let’s get going!

1. Prioritizing Your Tasks

The One Minute To-Do List method works with just 3 task priorities, all based on urgency:

1. Critical Now
2. Opportunity Now
3. Over the Horizon

The Critical Now priority is for tasks that are urgent and must be completed today. At any point, you shouldn’t have more than 5 tasks with this priority. This priority should be used only when necessary. If any action is not urgent and doesn’t absolutely have to be done today, then don’t prioritize it as “Critical Now”. It is perfectly OK to not have any “Critical Now” tasks.

Opportunity Now is for tasks that you would like to do today or this week, given the opportunity. You shouldn’t have more than 20 tasks with this priority.

Over the Horizon is for everything else. It’s great for tasks that are not concerning you right now, but that you don’t want to lose. You will revisit these later.

Why this works: Prioritizing by urgency makes much more sense than prioritizing by importance, because we tend to think that nearly everything is important. There is always some reason why any particular task is important. Yet, if everything is important, nothing really is. Also, it is the urgent tasks that are the most stressful. You simply need handle these first in any case. Mark Forster (Author of “Do-It Tomorrow”) also agrees that prioritizing by importance is a guaranteed failure. If you stop doing do the less-important things, they will eventually pile up and clog up your work.

How to implement this with Swift To-Do List: Because Swift To-Do List is very flexible, there are multiple ways of implementing this. You could either edit the inbuilt task priorities using menu Manage – Priorities, or, you could create a separate to-do list for tasks of each priority. Let’s go with the priority customization here, as that will allow you to use the to-do list tree for something else than priorities (e.g. project/area categorization).

Start Swift To-Do List (Download it if you haven’t already). Then, use menu Manage – Priorities:

This is how the default priorities look like:

Let’s delete the “High” and “Low” priorities, so only “Highest”, “Medium” and “Lowest” remain. Then, we will rename these remaining priorities:

1. Edit the “Highest” priority and rename it to “Critical Now”.
2. Edit the “Medium” priority and rename it to “Opportunity Now”.
3. Edit the “Low” priority and rename it to “Over the Horizon”.

This is how it should look once you are done:

And hey, feel free to change the colors. It’s your to-do list after all!

2. Capturing Your Tasks

• Always use the next action necessary to accomplish the task as the task name. That way, all task names will be actionable. It will be obvious what you need to do to move things forward.
• All your tasks should be in one place. The best place is your computer.
• All new incoming tasks should be put into your to-do list, regardless the source (email, phone, notes from co-workers or family members, meetings).

Why this works: Having actionable task names removes friction when it’s the time to actually do the task. You won’t have to think about what’s the next step, and it will be less intimidating. Having all your tasks on your computer is important, because your computer is the place where you carry out most of your work. Even if you would have your to-do list somewhere else, you would still need it on your computer. To-do list software has many advantages over paper to-do list. You can easily re-prioritize things, easily capture new tasks, write notes for each tasks, create reminders or recurring tasks, attach files and emails to your tasks, email tasks to others, and many other advantages. If you ever need a paper to-do list, you can simply print it. Mobile devices are useful for capturing new tasks, which you can put later into your main to-do list on your computer.

How to implement this with Swift To-Do List: Not only you should put all new incoming tasks into Swift To-Do List, but you should move all your existing tasks and lists into Swift To-Do List as well. This includes any tasks you have on your phone, on paper, in text files on your computer, or in other software.

To quickly enter multiple tasks, use menu Task – Add Multiple Tasks (Ctrl + H), then enter one task per line. If your tasks are in other software or spreadsheet, you can usually export them to CSV, and then import the CSV file into Swift To-Do List by using menu File – Import Wizard.

With Swift To-Do List, it is especially simple to create tasks from emails. If you use Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, The Bat, or other desktop email client, you can just drag & drop the emails into Swift To-Do List to create tasks. Here is a quick video how to create tasks from emails.

3. Reviewing Your Tasks

You should review the “Critical Now” tasks about once per hour.

You should review the “Opportunity Now” tasks once per day or more often.

You should review the “Over the Horizon” tasks once per week.

Why this works: If you review your urgent tasks often, you will feel in control, always know what needs to be done, and therefore greatly reduce stress. But it’s not enough to review just the urgent tasks, because non-urgent tasks will eventually become urgent too. You need to “catch” these before they get the chance to become urgent, and that can be accomplished with the daily and weekly reviews. Additionally, the reviews will help you to constantly re-focus to adjust your efforts. If you are focused on the right things at the right moment, you will be very efficient and productive.

How to implement this with Swift To-Do List: First, to be able to quickly review the Critical Now tasks, learn to use the global hotkey for quickly displaying Swift To-do List. This will allow you to review your tasks as often as you need. The default hotkey is Ctrl + Alt + S, and can be changed using menu File – Options. (In the Options window, it is located in the Hotkeys section.) Start using the hotkey often. It is useful especially whenever you are not entirely sure what to do next, and/or if you get distracted or interrupted.

Second, make it a habit to review your Opportunity Now tasks either when you start your workday or when you finish it.

Third, create a recurring weekly task to remind you to review all your Over the Horizon tasks. To do that:

1. Click the Add Task button.
2. Then, in the Add Task window, enter the task name: “Review all my Over the Horizon tasks”
3. Select the Priority – this task will have the “Over the Horizon” priority.
4. Go to the Recurrence tab, select “Weekly” as the interval, and in the Action dropdown, select “Set undone and remind me”. This way, Swift To-Do List will remind you once a week to review all your Over the Horizon tasks.
5. Press “OK” to add the task.

4. Keeping the List Reasonable

With a little discipline, it’s easy to stick to the rules of having no more than 5 tasks with the Critical Now priority, and no more than 20 tasks with Opportunity prioriy Now. If you have more than that, simply move some tasks to the lower (less urgent) priority.

The real problem here is that your list of tasks with “Over the Horizon” priority can quickly grow out of proportions. This is a problem, because you want the weekly review to be fast and easy. No one wants to read hundreds of irrelevant tasks.

To keep things manageable, Michael Linenberger recommends using the Start Date field for this purpose. Using the following clever technique, you can defer some Over the Horizon tasks for later review. That way, your list of Over the Horizon tasks that you review weekly won’t become too long. This is how it works:

First, all new tasks should have the Start Date set to today.

Second, all tasks that have Start Date in the future should be hidden.

Third, you can start deferring tasks by setting their Start Date to future. So, if don’t want to (or need to) review some tasks for some time, then set its Start Date to a future date. This will hide the task, and when that particular future date comes, this task will start appearing on your to-do list again.

Why this works: The number 1 reason people abandon a to-do list or organizing system is because they get overwhelmed. They put in too many tasks – and the once helpful tool now just adds to their stress, instead of reducing it. That’s why it’s important to regularly delete irrelevant tasks from your to-do list, and hide things that you don’t need to worry about for now. That way, your to-do list will stay relevant, up-to-date and useful.

How to implement this with Swift To-Do List: First, to make sure new tasks get the “Today” Start Date automatically set, do this: Use menu Manage – Columns, and enable the Start Date field (if it’s not already enabled). Then, use menu File – Options, and in the New Tasks tab of the Options window, select “Today” upon “Start Date”, as shown below:

Second, to hide all tasks with Start Date set to a future date, we will create a new filter: Use menu Manage – Filters, then click Add. In the Add Filter window, check “Start Date” and select “Today”. At the bottom, check “Include tasks with expired dates” and “Include tasks with unspecified dates”. Name the filter “Started” (or anything else) and click OK:

After you add this filter, apply it the main window by clicking the Filter toolbar button:

That’s the whole setup part. Now, every time you want to defer any task for a future review, edit it, and set its Start Date to the desired future review date. That will immediately hide it, and the task will start re-appearing in your to-do list on the future date.

And by the way, to move multiple tasks to another priority (e.g. from Opportunity Now to Over the Horizon), select them (e.g. using Ctrl + Click), then right-click them, and use Batch Edit – Priority in the popup menu.

And that’s it!

We’ve now covered all 4 main components of the One Minute To-Do List system: Prioritizing, Capturing, Reviewing, and Deferring. You are ready to use it. Just stick to the simple rules described in this short guide and you will reign over chaos and improve your life. For the best results, re-read this guide a week later or so once you have some experience with the system.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me, or submit a Reply in the form below. I am here to help. I am also very much interested in your results, so don’t hesitate to let me know them once you try this.

And by the way, this is what Jason, one of our customers/fan wrote me recently as reaction to this post:

I’ve read most of your blogs over the past couple of months as I’ve been looking for ways to calm down the task crisis that I’ve had. They have been very helpful and I thank you for taking the time to post them all! The One Minute To-Do List blog [post] is what finally clicked with me and that’s when I finally broke down and bought the Ultimate Edition.  I’ve been using ideas from that along with my own tweaks to help organize all the tasks I have for all the work and personal projects that I have going on.  I love how I can set a new start date to review something in the future and know that it won’t be forgotten nor in the way as I focus on my current tasks.

Related Posts:

• Swift Mind Freedom released!
• How to keep your to-do list useful, short and motivating
• Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Do I Need to GTD?
• Meta Productivity released! “Dramatically Increase Your Productivity”
• 3 easy techniques to instantly stop procrastinating
• 30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?

One Minute To-Do List is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog