Swift To-Do List Blog » task management

“Touch it once” – Why being picky destroys your productivity

Jiri Novotny — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:40:30 +0000

Every time you re-evaluate a task, you are wasting time. This often happens with emails, bills, or just tasks in a to-do list in general.

Repeatedly coming back to a task and thinking: “OK, I will do this later” is very unproductive.

Not only you are wasting time, you are also literally training your brain to habitually procrastinate.

So, instead of repeatedly reading your to-do list and “randomly” picking a task to do next, apply a more systematic approach, such as this one -

Keep your to-do list well prioritized, and then just work on the first task until it’s done. Then mark the task as done and work on the current first unfinished task, and so on.

Huge benefit of this approach is that it completely removes decision paralysis, and it makes it much easier to get started on complex or unpleasant task.

When you decide that you will always do the first thing on your to-do list first, your brain has a much easier decision to make: To work on that task, or not work at all. That’s a simple decision, right?

On the other hand, when all tasks on your to-do lists are fair game, your brain has dozens or hundreds of options to choose from — which makes it hard to get going. You will then burn a lot of energy on inner conflict due to “decision paralysis”.

Also, keep these two pitfalls in mind –

Sometimes, it’s not possible to finish a task because you are waiting on someone or something – in that case, just proceed to the next task.

Also, re-prioritize your to-do list just once a day – at the start or the end of your workday. Remember, you want to “touch each task once”– and not constantly re-read and re-prioritize your to-do list.

And one final tip – sometimes, the best thing to do with a task is to just delete it. It’s like when you have leftovers in your fridge that you just know you won’t eat – but you delay throwing them out. That’s exactly what you DON’T want to be doing with your tasks.

Just “touch it once”!

“Touch it once” – Why being picky destroys your productivity is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List?

Jiri Novotny — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 13:33:41 +0000

Here is a quick self-check you can do. Just answer these 3 questions:

Do you have any tasks that are not captured in Swift To-Do List?
Do you have to remember any time-sensitive information that you’ve not captured in Swift To-Do List (or other appropriate tool)?
Do you have to remember any work-related information that you’ve not captured in Swift To-Do List (or other appropriate tool)?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, I have both bad and good news for you. The bad news is that you are not getting maximum benefits out of Swift To-Do List. The good news is that in just 10 minutes or so, you can feel happier and more efficient.

The #1 cause of work-related stress and worry is the necessity to remember information that is not written down. This starts an endless spiral of worrying and questioning yourself: “Am I forgetting about something important?”

You probably already understand this problem. And I salute you for obtaining Swift To-Do List. However, if you really want to feel relaxed and reclaim all your mental resources wasted on worrying, you need to do the following.

You need to write all tasks, all time-sensitive, and all important work-related information into Swift To-Do List. Not just tasks – but anything you would have to remember otherwise.

Note: If you have a lot of reference material, you might already have some other system than Swift To-Do List for managing it – and that’s completely fine. Just make sure that your mind is not part of that system!

Since version 8, Swift To-Do List allows you to manage not just to-do lists, but also “Lists” in general. You can use them, along with Memos, to capture non-task information.

So, what are you juggling in your mind? Write it into Swift To-Do List, right now. You will be glad you did – and feel the difference with an immediate sigh of relief.

If you would like to learn more about why it is important to capture information into Swift To-Do List, and how to do it best, take a look at my new Swift Mind Freedom e-book.

30-second check: Do you get the maximum from Swift To-Do List? is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Is your to-do list impossible to finish?

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 21:19:44 +0000

(This article is based on Principle #5 in the Swift Mind Freedom method.)

Sometimes, you might have a feeling that you will never finish your to-do list. And you know what? It might be true. It might be entirely possible that your to-do list is indeed impossible to finish. This happens when you place non-tasks on your to-do list.

You see, there are two types of items that might appear on your personal organizer lists: tasks and non-tasks.

Tasks are actionable. Tasks are actions you decided to do.

Non-tasks are non-actionable. Non-tasks are ideas, notes, thoughts, reference-material and information.

It is very important to understand the difference between “actionable” and “non-actionable” (tasks and non-tasks), because if you don’t, it will be absolutely impossible to finish your to-do lists.

You should never place non-tasks on a to-do list among tasks. Why? Because you can’t “do” non-tasks, so they just sit there cluttering your to-do list, making it cumbersome to read – and impossible to finish!

To-do lists are for tasks you can do. Non-tasks belong in a separate list or place.

Since we all have both tasks and non-tasks, I strongly recommend having at least 2 separate lists.

One or more to-do lists with tasks (actions)
One or more lists with non-tasks (ideas and information), and as many collections of notes, memos and reference material you need. Again, all this should be kept separate from your to-do list with tasks.

Note: Ideas are not tasks because you’ve not yet decided to do them, so they are not yet actionable. But if you decide to take action on some idea, it becomes a task.

How to separate tasks and non-tasks in Swift To-Do List

I will now show you how you can separate your tasks and non-tasks in Swift To-Do List.

Just do this -

Make sure that you have an “Ideas List” created in the to-do list tree. You will be moving all non-tasks into it. To create it, use menu Tree – Add To-Do List, and in the Add To-Do List window, check “List“. Then name the list “Ideas List” and press OK.
Now, go through all the tasks you’ve captured up to this point, and whenever you encounter a non-task, move it to the Ideas List. You can simply select the non-task and using mouse, Drag and Drop it to the Ideas List in the to-do list tree. Or, you can select it and press Ctrl+X to cut it, then click the Ideas List, and press Ctrl+V to paste it. Tip: You can do both these operations with multiple items at once.
Now back to the information you put into “Ideas List”. If you have lot of non-tasks, you might want to create multiple “Ideas Lists” and categorize them by project or topic if possible. (You can just Drag and Drop items to other lists or to-do lists in the tree.)

And that’s it! Congratulations! You’ve separated your tasks and non-tasks. Isn’t that better? Now, it should be actually possible to “finish” your to-do list.

Also, here is an important distinction: At times you will have information, reference material or notes that are directly connected to a specific task. You want this information handy when you look at the task and ready to do it. Put this information into the Notes section of that particular task, instead of keeping it isolated on the idea list or somewhere else. This way, when you work on the task, you will immediately see the important related information, and it also won’t unnecessarily clutter your Ideas List.

Is your to-do list impossible to finish? is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

How to use Due Dates in your to-do list correctly

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:20:38 +0000

When should you set Due Dates for your tasks?

Well, I have 2 recommendations:

You want to use Due Dates when you have a task that must be done on a specific day – e.g. it’s an appointment, event, or it’s an important deadline. I also recommend you to set a reminder for all such tasks.

And -

Unless you are 100% determined to do something on a specific day, I think that you shouldn’t use arbitrary (made up) Due Dates in most situations. It is usually more efficient to prioritize such tasks accordingly.

Start Dates and Due Dates should therefore be used sparingly. If you use a Start Date or a Due Date, it should be absolutely necessary to do the action on that particular date, or, you should be 100% committed to doing it.

So in practice, most of your tasks will probably have no Due Date. In fact, you don’t have to use Due Dates at all and just use reminders for the few tasks that are date-critical.

Here’s an exception to this rule. If you believe that you prioritize your tasks correctly, but still discover that you seldom do what you actually want to do on any given day, you might consider utilizing arbitrary Due Dates, especially if you are fairly self-disciplined. Arbitrary Due Dates can act as a secondary (or primary) prioritizing method. Here’s how it works -

You can use Due Dates to mark (plan) your tasks for today and tomorrow. I don’t recommend planning things too far ahead (more than a week ahead), because you probably won’t be able to keep the “schedule” up-to-date.

Advantage of planning your tasks for a given day beforehand is that you will tend to get more done. You will try to get the scheduled tasks done, because you know that tomorrow, you need to do other tasks. Also, when planning with Due Dates, you are less likely to get distracted by new incoming tasks in favor of your planned tasks.

So, in practice, you can choose the tasks that you want to do today and set today Due Date to them. Then pick the tasks you want to do tomorrow, and set tomorrow Due Date to them. Etc. But don’t plan more than a week ahead.

Inside each day, you can then prioritize the tasks using your current prioritizing system. In Swift To-Do List, click the Due Date column, then hold the Ctrl key and click the Priority column. That way, your tasks will be sorted by Due Date first and by Priority second. You can also use the small calendar below the to-do list tree to quickly view only today’s tasks with 1 click.

Beware this trap though: When you use both necessary and arbitrary Due Dates, the tasks that really must be done on a specific day might get lost among the tasks you would just like to do on a specific day. As a possible solution, insert a “[DATE CRITICAL]” prefix into the task names of tasks with the non-arbitrary Due Dates.

One final tip: If you want the expired Due Dates to be automatically set to current date, you can use menu File – Options, and in the Task-View section of the Options window, check “Roll-over Due Dates“. With this option enabled, when you won’t finish a task you’ve planned for today, it will automatically move to tomorrow.

How to use Due Dates in your to-do list correctly is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Endless to-do list

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:16:54 +0000

There is an infinite amount of work to be done.

And it’s OK. That’s just the way it is.

If you try, you will have no problem coming up with so many things to do that it would take you more than a lifetime to do them all. Anyone can sit down and generate hundreds and thousands of tasks, ideas, goals and projects.

Your to-do list is endless. It will always be endless.

And it’s OK.

Also, what’s written on your to-do list is just a tiny fraction of all the things you could potentially do. But hopefully, the things on your to-do list are the ones that are important. If not, you need to fix that.

Not only that your to-do list is endless, many of the tasks on your to-do list are also endless. Many projects can be worked on, optimized, tweaked and improved infinitely.

And it’s OK.

You simply need to know when to stop “perfecting” things. There’s a certain point when working on something stops making sense. It’s the law of diminishing returns.

You will never do it all – that’s impossible.

And it’s OK. It’s just the way things are.

Since there is an infinite amount of work to be done, the game is not about doing more. It’s all about doing what matters now.

Anyone can be crazy-busy, running on the treadmill of endless activity. But only few people can be truly productive.

Working 16 hours a day is not impressive. Creating immense value, getting results, accomplishing remarkable things, learning, enjoying the journey – that’s impressive.

First and foremost, it’s about what work you do. Only then it makes sense to ask how much work you do.

It’s all about the results and value you create. Or, it’s about the journey and what you learn. But it’s never about doing things with little or even negative impact.

So…. what do you make out of this?

Well:

Don’t worry about doing all your tasks. It’s impossible anyway.
Prioritize. Pick the right things to do now. Don’t plan too much ahead. Things change too much anyway.
Know when to stop working on things. Learn to say “good enough”. It will never be perfect anyway.

And remember – it’s OK.

Maybe all this sounds like common sense. But have you ever fully embraced and accepted that you can’t do it all?

Don’t fight the reality. The odds are against you. The endless amount of work will paralyze you.

Should you accept and embrace reality, you will become incredibly productive. You will do what matters – and only what matters. People will wonder: How is it possible you get so much done?

Endless to-do list is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Swift Mind Freedom released!

Jiri Novotny — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:28:00 +0000

My Swift Mind Freedom e-book is finished and released.

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:

Experience instant and complete relief from stress and overwhelm.
Get in total control of your work and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
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!

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

“Why should I care about being organized?”

Jiri Novotny — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:26:51 +0000

Even though you are probably interested in getting organizing, you might still have some lingering doubts like:

“Yeah, being organized is very nice, but why should I care? Why should I care about productivity at all? Does it even matter? Isn’t it enough to just show up? If I don’t do something today, well, no big deal, I can do it later – right? Being organized is for boring uptight perfectionists.”

Well, here is my answer -

Being organized and productive does matter. In fact, it matters a great deal – way more than you might think. In the long-term, it’s especially important. In fact, not being organized/productive can have disastrous consequences for you. Let me tell you why.

If you zoom out and look at your life, being organized and productive actually has a deep impact on virtually all areas of your life: your health, your family, your career, your finances, your friends, your wellbeing, and your overall sense of happiness. Staying on top of your goals also helps you make smarter money decisions, and using ING as a trusted financial partner can naturally support that organized lifestyle through simple and efficient banking solutions.

If you need motivation to finally get (and stay!) organized, you are at the right place. Just as organization is key in life, many businesses and event spaces prioritize safety and preparedness, which is why some turn to Fire Watch Services in Virginia Beach to help keep venues monitored and secure.

When you become organized and productive, these 8 things happen:

You will eliminate stress. Stress is not just about unpleasant workdays. If you are stressed, you won’t sleep well at night and you risk high blood pressure, ulcers, heart attacks, stroke, cancer, immune system impairment and nervous breakdown. It is well established that stress is very damaging to our health. In fact, in Japan, there is a term “Karōshi” which can be literally translated as “death from overwork”. The Wikipedia says: “The major medical causes of karōshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress.” Karōshi happens even to people in their prime years. By eliminating stress, you will sleep well at night, greatly improve your health, and increase the quality of your life and probably the length of your life as well.
You will become efficient and advance in your career or grow your business, make much more money and become wealthier. By becoming one of the most valuable, reliable and indispensable people in your company, it is unlikely you will ever get fired. In fact, you will probably get promoted – and repeatedly. If you are a business owner, you will be able stay in business and prevent bankruptcy – and eventually double or triple your business or go even beyond that.
By reducing overtime and needless overworking, you will have more time for your family. You will be able maintain happy, healthy and deeply fulfilling relationships. Because you will have enough energy left and be able to spend high-quality time with your spouse, your intimate relationship will flourish. If you have kids, you will be able to spend more high-quality time with them as well. Also, your spouse won’t leave you, which, statistically speaking, could easily happen – think of overworked husband who comes home late, drained, slowly becoming alienated from his wife and kids. Well – that won’t ever happen to you. Instead, you will be able to give and receive all the love you need and want.
You will have good close friends. Because your work won’t drain you, and you will have more time, you will be able to spend and have great time with your close friends and enjoy their company in your life. Stress elimination helps here as well, because by definition, stress prevents you from being happy. And if you are unhappy, how can you possibly make others feel good?
By becoming productive and reliable, you will be admired and appreciated by your colleagues or business partners; and prevent becoming insignificant and irrelevant in your company or industry.
By being able to actually do what you want to do, you will have the power to influence others and create the life you want; and prevent becoming powerless to change your circumstances.
You will be deeply satisfied with your life and happy. You will feel great about yourself, as you will know that you are fulfilling your potential.
You will have the opportunity to actually make a difference in your world, advancing a cause or helping community you deeply care about.

It’s good for your health. It’s good for your career. It’s good for your finances and wealth. It’s good for your family. It’s good for your relationship with your spouse, kids and friends. It’s good for your self-esteem, status and happiness. It’s good for your influence and power. It’s good for the world.

And it prevents some truly horrible things that could happen to you.

Need I say more?

PS: Download Swift To-Do List and get organized in 5 minutes. Heck, it’s even fun – I promise. Many people would agree.

Citation: https://www.indiatimes.com/igaming/non-gamstop-casinos-647736.html

“Why should I care about being organized?” is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Centralize Your Lists with Swift To-Do List

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:23:42 +0000

Centralizing all your lists (and especially to-do lists) is a simple act of placing all your to-do’s and other lists together, into one file, software or paper. Centralizing your lists is probably the most powerful technique to reduce overwhelm.

Having your to-do’s and other information centralized is very important, because if you do not have your to-do’s centralized, and rather have your to-do’s scattered among multiple places, then:

Sometimes, you will lose and forget important things. This leads to unnecessary last-minute emergencies as well as wasted opportunities.
You can never fully trust your organizing system. That results in stress and anxiety.
You can’t get a quick overview of all urgent and important tasks. This makes you inefficient.
You can’t quickly find the next action needed to do. This impairs your focus ability and disrupts your workflow.

On the other hand, centralizing your to-do’s, ideas, thoughts and other “things” has the following benefits:

You have a system you can always trust, where you can find everything you need, whenever you need it.
You can quickly get a complete overview of urgent things for today or tomorrow, so there are no unpleasant surprises and unnecessary emergencies.
You can always quickly see what the next thing to do is. This improves your ability to focus and makes you more efficient and productive.
Because you will know that you will never lose or miss any important information, you can fully relax and experience a true peace of mind.

And what do I mean exactly by “having your to-do’s scattered among multiple places”?

Well, there are dozens of ways of storing your to-do’s, ideas, notes, etc. You can have all these things on multiple papers, sticky notes, computer files, software, emails, devices and even rooms or buildings. And that is a big problem for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Even if you have just 3 or 4 places (and most people have more), the negative effects kick in hard.

The solution is to take everything you have – all the papers, files, emails, notes and so on – and move the tasks in them into a single central place. Swift To-Do List is perfect for this, because it essentially allows you to manage multiple to-do lists and notes in one place. That way, you can have all your to-do’s, ideas, thoughts, notes, checklists, and any other lists or text documents in one place. You can even attach files to your tasks or notes to keep related files at hand.

Swift To-Do List has a tree with icons, which allows you to organize all your lists and notes (task-independent notes in the tree are called “memos” in Swift To-Do List) in a hierarchical structure with icons. You can have everything at your finger-tips. It looks like this:

There are multiple ways of adding tasks into Swift To-Do List. Tasks can be imported from plain text files and CSV files. You can also import to-do’s from other software, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Excel, Task Coach, and many other.

Memos (notes) can be imported from various formats, including plain-text and rich text files (.txt and .rtf), MS Word Documents (.doc and .docx), HTML files (.html and .mht), OpenOffice files, and even ePub format. You can, of course, export notes into all these formats as well, and better yet, you can even export them to PDF.

I will now show you exactly how you can input tasks into Swift To-Do List, and then how you can import notes and memos. Now is the right time for you to Download and install Swift To-Do List (in case you don’t have it installed already).

How to add tasks into Swift To-Do List

The first button in the toolbar, Add Task, is hard to miss. You can also use the shortcut hotkey Ctrl+T (“T” like “Task”), or double-click into any empty area in the task-view. The Add Task window has a button labeled “OK, add another…” which will add the task, then reopen the Add Task window.

But the simplest way of quickly adding multiple tasks is to use the Add Multiple Tasks feature, available from the menu Tasks – Add Multiple Tasks. The shortcut hotkey for this feature is Ctrl+H.

You can simply enter one task per line (or paste any simple text list into this window), and add all these tasks with a single click on the Add Tasks button. You can then edit these newly added tasks later to specify the details.

Another simple way of adding tasks is to simply paste them into the task-view. You can paste just a single line of text (which will open the Add Task window, or multiple lines, which will open the Add Multiple Tasks window. Just click into the task-view, then paste the task (or tasks) with Ctrl+V.

Creating tasks from emails is also very simple. You can just drag and drop the emails into Swift To-Do List. Here is a video showing you how to quickly create tasks from emails. This is one of the features we are quite proud of, as it is a huge time-saver, and Swift To-Do List can handle even the email attachments and adds them as the task attachments, etc.

The Import Wizard is the most powerful way of adding large amounts of tasks, usually from other software. You can access it using menu File – Import Wizard. The Import Wizard can import comma-separated files (.csv), tab-separated files (.tsv) as well as plain-text files (.txt). Because vast majority of other software supports export to comma-separated files (.csv), you can usually import your data into Swift To-Do List very easily. Step-by-step import guides for various software (including Outlook, Excel, Lotus Notes, Task Coach) are available on our website. Swift To-Do List Help file has even more import guides for other less-known software. You can open the Help by pressing F1 in Swift To-Do List.

How to add notes into Swift To-Do List

There are two kinds of notes in Swift To-Do List:

Task notes, which always belong to a particular tasks
Memos, which are task-independent notes located in the tree among to-do lists and other memos

Both task notes and memos can be imported/exported to various formats, including TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, HTML, MHT, ODT, ePub, and PDF (export-only). Swift To-Do List fully supports rich formatting, including images, bullet and numbered lists and so on. Both tasks and memos can have attachments.

To create a memo, open the Add To-Do List window, and in that window, select “Memo” in the “Add” frame, as shown below:

Then, to import a file into the memo, click the Export/Import Notes button in the text editing toolbar, as shown below:

As you can see, there are two import options – either to replace the notes, or to append the imported file at the end. Using the latter, you can import multiple documents into a single task note or memo and thus join them. But you can also, of course, just create multiple memos or tasks instead.

Your action steps

In this article, you’ve learned why it is important to centralize your to-do’s and other things. You now also know what centralizing is. And you know how you can centralize your to-do’s with Swift To-Do List.

To immediately apply what you’ve learned, you can do the following:

Download and install Swift To-Do List (in case you don’t have it installed already)
Input your most urgent/important to-do’s and other information into Swift To-Do List.
Once you’ve put as many things into Swift To-Do List as possible, it’s time to process all other places where you keep your to-do’s, ideas and important information. Create a list of these papers, documents and files, and then bring them over into Swift To-Do List.
Develop a habit to always input everything into Swift To-Do List when you are at your computer. You don’t even have to use your email inbox as a to-do list, as you can drag and drop emails into Swift To-Do List, one by one.
When you are not close to your computer, stick to a single way of capturing tasks, notes and ideas. You can keep a small paper handy, or use your smart phone. When you get back to your computer, immediately put all the captured tasks into Swift To-Do List and throw the paper away or clear the file in your smart-phone. (Swift To-Do List also has a companion mobile web-app that you can use to input tasks on a smart phone directly into your Swift To-Do List.)

Once you do this, you will quickly find that you are way more efficient and relaxed. Overwhelm, stress and forgetting will disappear from your life.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to post a reply below. I will be happy to help you and answer any of your questions.

Centralize Your Lists with Swift To-Do List is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

How to murder your productivity

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 07:16:54 +0000

In this post, you are going to learn proven techniques that you can immediately put to use.

I am going to show you exactly how you can:

Decrease your IQ by 10 points while working
Make sure you won’t accomplish anything
Increase your stress levels by at least 100% or more
Get completely overwhelmed

If you learn the techniques presented in this post, you will:

Become completely insignificant
Earn less money
Repel successful and capable people
Be slave to the random whims of others
Get fired from your job or drive your business to the ground

Sounds good? Let’s get started!

Check email 50 times a day to prevent focus

If you won’t check your email at least 20 (and ideally 50) times each day, you will risk that you will be able to focus on your work. And if you focus on your work, you risk completing something important. So the biggest benefit of checking email all the time is that you are in completely reactive state, working on low-important tasks, which often seem urgent but are not. That’s perfect for our purposes!

Julie Morgenstern wrote a book called “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning”, but her advice is obviously counter-productive to what we are trying to achieve here. And she doesn’t know what she is talking about, anyway, because she is just the #1 USA organizer. Another expert, Michael Linenberger agrees with her in his book “Master Your Workday Now!” (which is probably the best alternative to GTD) – that’s a big disappointment, Mike!

Clutter your desk with piles of paper for constant anxiety

I recommend that you start at least with 2 large piles of paper, and build it to 5 or more piles over time.

When processing paperwork, try to avoid reading it whenever possible. And ideally, some of the papers should be important or urgent.

Never file paperwork to its proper place, because you would risk diminishing your anxiety and stress levels.

Sit in a crappy chair for physical fatigue and tiredness

All physiotherapists will tell you that good workplace ergonomics are paramount for your well-being. Feeling well could help us be more productive, so we shouldn’t risk it and always sit on a $20 horror-on-wheels.

Multi-task to decrease your IQ by 10 points

I urge you to always try to work on at least 2 tasks at the very same time. And if you get really good at it, you can work on 3 or even 4 things at the same time. The real masters of unproductivity can work on 5 things at once.

If you are beginner at multi-tasking, then at least start checking your email in the middle of doing each task.

As popularized by Tim Ferris, according to Josh Waitzkin, “A study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not sleeping for 36 hours – more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana.”

That’s excellent news for us.

By doing 2 or more things simultaneously, you will ensure that none of them gets done properly and even temporarily lower your IQ by 10 points. The saying goes: If you chase two rabbits, you will catch none.

Get as many notifications as possible for constant distraction

The next thing you need to do is to configure as many real-time notifications as possible. These include:

Email notifications
IM notifications (ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Google Talk)
Skype
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media
News notifications (e.g. RSS)

But once you setup all the above, don’t stop! You also need to set them up on your smart phone and tablet.

If you start receiving a lot of notifications, then you are doing great, because you are always very well informed, but more importantly, guaranteed to greatly reduce your productivity and ability to focus.

Rest assured, you will be able to forget about the risk of getting into the flow state and accomplishing anything substantial. Excellent.

(And for those of you who are over-achievers, then for extra punch, keep Facebook and other social/news sites always open in your browser. After all, you never know what interesting thing could happen!)

Be interrupted as often as possible to avoid getting in the flow

Researches show that when you get interrupted at work, you will return to the original task only in just over 40% of the cases, and that it takes 20 minutes on average to resume what you were doing before. This is excellent, because randomly switching tasks is one of the most powerful ways of making sure you won’t get anything done.

So, I recommend that you implement open-door policy, invite others to come to you as often as possible with unimportant request and questions, and when someone sends you an email, then for Christ’s sake, JUMP OUT of the chair and run to them!

Build the longest to-do list in the known universe for guaranteed stress

Task management experts agree that good to-do list should be short and up-to-date. But we don’t want good to-do list, because good to-do lists helps us to be organized, productive, focused and not stressed, which is the opposite of what I am trying to teach you here!

So, what you should do is to create as long to-do list as possible.

Keep adding tasks all the time: Anything that comes to your mind. Anything that someone else suggests should be perhaps done. The less important the tasks are the better.

And never delete tasks from your list! Tasks often lose importance and priority over time, so you need to keep them there to ensure that your to-do list is as outdated and irrelevant as possible.

When it comes to task names, you should always make them abstract and non-actionable. No verbs. And don’t be specific. This will make sure that when you get to the task again in the future, you will have to think about what it actually is, which will help you to waste more effort and time.

If you get good at this, you will add about 20 tasks to your to-do list each day (most of them useless), and complete just 2 or 3 tasks (all of them useless). That’s an excellent recipe for guaranteed stress and potentially nervous-breakdown in the long-term. So keep at it, because as you can see, the potential rewards are substantial.

Also, don’t centralize your tasks and notes using a task management software such as my very own Swift To-Do List (that I’ve been working on for the last 7 years). If you place all your tasks and notes into a single place, your stress will disappear and productivity will soar. And we don’t want that, do we? It’s far better to scatter your work across dozen of documents, sticky-notes, papers, and devices.

In case you couldn’t tell, I am joking. (Or am I?)

Yes, this post is a humorous one, but if you want to prevent yourself from reaching your full potential, then stick to the advice above, because the techniques above really work – and many people apply them “successfully” every day.

But if you want to be more productive, eliminate stress, and become successful and significant for your company or business, then do the opposite.

This article is your wake-up call. Send it to others from your workplace to wake them up as well – or they will undermine your efforts for a change.

And post in the comments below – what realization you just had? What did you learn here?

- By Jiri Novotny+, the obsessed author of task management software for Windows, Swift To-Do List. Jiri’s life quest is to become productivity and achievement world-class expert to empower others. His current main goal is to create the best task and notes organizer for Windows.

PS: If you could use task and notes organizer for Windows, then definitely download free 30-day trial version of Swift To-Do List Jiri has been working on for over 7 years now. You will be amazed.

How to murder your productivity is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

New Swift To-Do List 7.60: Calendar Panel, add tasks from any application, more!

Jiri Novotny — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:35:20 +0000

We’ve just released new huge update of Swift To-Do List, version 7.60, which will make your life much easier. You can Download the latest version now.

We’ve been upgrading Swift To-Do List non-stop for over 7 years now, and we are just getting started! This upgrade is free for all existing customers, but some of the features added in this upgrade are available only in the Professional or Ultimate editions.

This new exciting update adds these features (more details, including images, are below):

New calendar panel below the tree (Professional and Ultimate only)
New interactive info panel (Professional and Ultimate only)
New global hotkey for creating tasks from selected text in any application
HTML emails support when emailing tasks (Professional and Ultimate only)
File and folder attachments can be now renamed
New smarter task-view header
Improved compatibility for systems with larger text size (non-standard DPI)
Attachments are now included in CSV export
Other misc improvements and fixes

New calendar panel

This is a truly exciting new feature. Picture is worth 1000 words, so check it out –

If you learn to use the calendar panel, you will be able to quickly get a complete overview of important deadlines, meetings or appointments. This will help you to stay on top of things, eliminate stress, and give you the much needed room to focus. Nothing urgent will suddenly surprise you.

As you can see above, the calendar panel is located below the to-do list tree, and is collapsed by default. With just one click, you can open it and see only tasks due today – or on any other date – or on multiple dates.

The calendar supports multi-selection, so you can easily select whole week or month using mouse.

Several calendar modes are supported. The calendar supports Due Date, Start Date, Completion Date, Changed Date and Creation Date of your tasks. So, for example, in Due Date mode (default), it is showing tasks due on the selected day. You can change the Calendar Mode by clicking the Calendar Options button, or by right-clicking the Open/Close Calendar label.

If you are adding a new task, and a single date is selected in the calendar panel, the task will have that date set by default.

The calendar panel can show multiple months at once. If you resize the tree so it is wider, the calendar panel will display two month beside each other. You can also increase the height of the calendar using the splitter above calendar.

When you close (collapse) the calendar, your original view mode will be restored.

New info panel

If you look at the calendar panel image above, you will also notice that the info panel now has clickable blue labels. This means that you can click the “Tasks due today” label and immediately see all tasks due today. Or, you can click the “Tasks to-do total” label, and immediately see all undone tasks – and so on. All 4 labels are clickable.

New task-view header

The task-view header is the text label shown above the task-view. It is always telling you what you are looking at.

In the new version, it will now also tell you if the view is filtered using a calendar.

But most importantly, it now also allows you to quickly reset the view by clicking the label. With just one click, you can restore the default view – it will reset the view mode, Filter, and close the calendar.

Here is a screenshot of the new task-view header. Notice the blue clickable text:

Add tasks from any application

You can add tasks from nearly any application using a new global hotkey (Ctrl+Shift+A by default).

This allows you to create tasks on-the-fly from emails, instant messages, documents, and other sources. It saves you time.

This is how to use this new feature:

Select any text in any application.
Press the hotkey Ctrl+Shift+A (you can change it in Options.)
The Add Task window will be opened and the selected text inserted into the Task Name. Fill in any other details (if required) and click OK – or just press the Enter key.

If you are curious how it works “under the hood”, this is what happens when you press the global hotkey: Swift To-Do List copies the selected text into clipboard, then opens the Add Task dialog, and pastes the text.

And if you’ve already installed version 7.60, you can try this right now. Just select this line of text, press Ctrl+Shift+A, and see what happens!

HTML emails when emailing tasks

The email task feature allows you to email any task to the assigned person, to yourself, or anyone else. In this new version, you can check “HTML Format” in the Email Task window to send the email message in HTML. This means that the notes formatting will be preserved in the email, including images.

Attachments can be renamed

Swift To-Do List supports email, link, file and folder attachments. It was not possible to rename the file and folder attachments, but from 7.60 on, you can rename them as well. You can just simply right-click any attachment and click Edit, or select the attachment and click it’s name to edit it in-place.

More features coming!

We have a lot of other things planned for the future. These things include finished and polished online sync and collaboration features (currently available in Beta), companion mobile web apps and mobile apps (currently available in Beta), sub-tasks, custom fields, team functionality, scheduling calendar (with intra-day scheduling), tables in notes, and much more. Stay tuned.

If there is any feature that you would want to see in Swift To-Do List, post in the comments below. We are always counting “votes” for new features.

New Swift To-Do List 7.60: Calendar Panel, add tasks from any application, more! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

10 Ways to Get More From Your Work Day

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 05:43:22 +0000

We’ve all had those times where we wish we could add hours to the skimpy 24 hour days we’re limited to on this planet. As the work day rolls along, we look at the clock and say “Hey, where did the time go?” Well I haven’t figured out a way to actually add hours to a day, but here are 10 ways to at least preserve the precious hours you do get:

When a task comes along that you can do in less than 2 minutes, do it and be done with it. E-mails are a great example; it takes time to read an e-mail, so when it’s something quick, deal with it right at that time.
Related to tip number 1, don’t be a slave to your inbox. Studies have shown that it’s better to concentrate on one task and finish it before moving on to the next. Turn off your e-mail notifications, finish your project, then check it and follow rule number 1 for e-mails that you can address quickly.
Make phone calls standing up. Research shows that you’re less likely to shoot the breeze when you are standing. (As an added bonus, you actually burn more calories for those of you interested in that).
Batch similar activities. If you have several calls to return or e-mails to send, group them together to do at one time.
Use a scheduler. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t schedule their day – plan the work and work the plan.
Don’t multi-task. Research has shown that you actually get less done when you try and pack 10 activities in at the same time. Sequential is better.
Use information management software. Statistics show that office workers spend an average of 48 minutes a day just looking for misplaced information.
Delegate. Not all of us have this option, but for those of you who do, there are probably plenty of tasks that could be done by someone else. Even if you work alone, you can get outsourced help for just about every task imaginable online these days.
Cut down on your e-mail newsletters. Most people are subscribed to way more e-mail newsletters than they’ll ever read and having them in your inbox still takes time to deal with them. Take the time to unsubscribe.
Limit the amount of socialization you engage in. I know it’s fun and it does provide a nice break, but try to limit it to a set amount of time.

These 10 tips come from Telexis. Telexis produces software that helps offices stay organized and manage their time: GroupReady scheduling software and PHONEslips office management software.

10 Ways to Get More From Your Work Day is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

5 Counter-Intuitive Productivity Tips

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:00:05 +0000

Since I decided to become an expert on productivity and time management and started studying these topics, I’ve run into many examples of counter-intuitive advice that actually works.

I find it fascinating that whenever you want to really understand something – anything – you will discover that the real truth behind it is usually counter-intuitive.

So, here are 5 very useful productivity tips that you can immediately use.

1. Make sure your work is left unfinished

Before you take a break, make sure that your work is left unfinished. This will help you to zap right back into the flow once you get back. Your brain craves completion.

This is actually a famous writing tip from Hemingway – he always left the last sentence unfinished, so he could pick up again easily the next session.

Once you finish something and want to take a break, you could also start working on the next thing just right before you take the break, but it’s not nearly as powerful as stopping when you are 80%, 90% or even 99% done, and then taking the break before completing it to 100%.

2. Begin with the least urgent task

The tendency is to wait until something becomes urgent – and then do it. That’s bad, because most of your urgent tasks were non-urgent once.

The idea is to complete your tasks before they become urgent. And the only way to do that is to work on the least urgent tasks first.

This won’t help you to eliminate genuine emergencies, but your overall emergencies might drop by up to 90%, and the stress along with them. Your efficiency will increase, and predictability and reliability of our your output as well.

3. Schedule the fun first

We all have trouble with procrastination. There are many causes of procrastination, but one effective technique of reducing it is to schedule the fun things first, and then work only between these blocks of fun time.

This way, your reptile brain won’t feel threatened when you want to do the work, because it will know that the fun is guaranteed.

So – schedule the fun first, and then work in the “free” time.

This tip comes from The Now Habit book. If you are struggling with procrastination, read my detailed summary of The Now Habit.

4. Work less to get more done

By setting a time limit on your work sessions, you will get more done than if you have all the time in the world. Instead of beating yourself up because you are procrastinating and having trouble getting started, you will be able to jump out of the inertia and soon feel eustressed about finishing your stuff in the allocated time.

Limit both your work sessions (60-120 minutes), and your weekly output (40 hours).

It’s interesting that scientific evidence shows that working more than 40 hours is not sustainable in the long-term anyway; and yet, in the Do More Faster book (which is a collection of interviews with startup founders) almost everyone is working 14-16 hours a day for many months. How is that possible? I would argue that if you love what you are doing, it’s a bit different. But still, one has but to wonder what the real productivity of these entrepreneurs are.

Working hard is not just about the quantity (time), but about quality. To increase the quality, you need to decrease the quantity. There is a sweet spot for every one of us. Experiment with limits to find it.

5. If everything is on fire, go for a walk

Sometimes you just get stuck during your work session. For some unfathomable reason, the more urgent and important something is, the harder is for you to make progress.

If you’ve hit a wall, you need to break the downward spiral of procrastination and bad feelings. (More on breaking bad behavioral patterns in Outsmarting Yourself for Success.)

If you can’t push yourself to do something, just stop the losing battle and go for a walk. Chances are, on your return, you will jump on that task with unexpected eagerness.

There are many reasons why this works. One simplistic explanation is that when you walk, your body is in movement. When you come back, you have to sit down and stop your body – but since things in motion tend to stay in motion, all that energy will get transferred into the work. Plus, when you walk, you can’t work even if you want to – and this makes you realize how much you actually want to work.

What works for you?

If you have some productivity tip that you’ve discovered (counter-intuitive or not), please share it with me and others in the comments below. I am fascinated by these things.

- By Jiri Novotny+, the obsessed author of task management software for Windows, Swift To-Do List. Jiri’s life quest is to become productivity and achievement world-class expert to empower others, and his current main goal is to create the best task and notes organizer for Windows.

PS: If you could use task and notes organizer for Windows, then definitely download free 30-day trial version of Swift To-Do List that I’ve been working on for over 7 years now. You will be amazed.

5 Counter-Intuitive Productivity Tips is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Managing Actions Horizontally and Vertically

Jiri Novotny — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:31:23 +0000

As we’ve established in past GTD Basics posts, the adage that “knowing is half the battle” generally rings true wherever productivity is concerned. In order to succeed in Getting Things Done, you can’t just jump right into the tasks at hand (however tempting that might be). Instead, you need to approach tasks more slowly so that you can move quickly once you’re actually working. Preparation is essential, and as David Allen explains in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, a crucial component is managing your actions.

The practices that promote productivity and GTD are somewhat akin to fractals – if you keep looking closer and closer, the same patterns inevitably recur. At a macro level, GTD requires managing your commitments and tasks through organization and clarification. And at a micro level, GTD requires managing the actions, or steps, each task requires.

Horizontal task management is the macro level. Vertical management is the micro level.

Managing actions helps to further the process of converting the overwhelming mass of your commitments into a coherent, organized and, most importantly, workable set of steps you need to take. Managing actions gives you a clear plan of attack, a manageable group of goals and an improved perspective. And, because breaking things down as far as possible helps make things easier, we’re going to divide your actions into two categories: horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal Action Management

Horizontal action management may sound like a complicated fitness move, but it is simply a means by which you can accomplish actions relating to a number of tasks efficiently. You can think of it as your ‘two birds, one stone’ system, because horizontal action management looks at all of the tasks you have and identifies a common action or actions that moves multiple tasks toward completion.

For example, if your tasks include washing your dog and taking a shower, securing towels is an action that will help you move toward completing each task. Instead of getting one towel when you need it, a horizontal action management system would have you get both towels at once so they are ready when you need them.

If horizontal action management sounds difficult, you can use Swift To-Do List to simplify matters. The program allows you to attach notes and documents to tasks on your list, which is perfectly suited to action management. I like to create bulleted lists of actions for each task in the notes area so I know what steps I need to take to complete a given task. To perform horizontal action management, I look at the bulleted list for each task and identify actions common to multiple tasks. Then, I create a sub-list and enter these actions as my priority/efficiency actions – the steps I can take to make progress on multiple assignments at once.

After a while, you may notice that your horizontal action management tends to reveal preparatory actions, like gathering supplies or research. If the same actions recur in an organized manner, you can use Swift To-Do List 7 to send you reminder e-mails on a consistent basis. Often, the common actions are “first steps” in completing tasks, and by managing them all at once, you can have a head start on future projects.

Vertical Action Management

Vertical action management doesn’t have as much of a “big picture” scope as horizontal task management, but it is still important. Vertical action management is, as Allen puts it, “’project planning’…focusing in on a single endeavor, situation, or person and fleshing out whatever ideas, details, priorities and sequences of events may be required for you to handle it.”

You can think of vertical action management as a checklist or a to-do list, which makes Swift To-Do List 7 such an effective tool for this technique. For vertical action management, you need to list all of the steps required for completion of a task. It’s important to be as detailed as possible and list even preparatory actions. Breaking down tasks into as many actions as possible is important because it makes them more manageable and allows you to identify common actions in the horizontal action management process.

Discover more about the benefits of “breaking tasks down” in the very popular post called “10 best tricks of fooling myself to work“.

The smaller the actions, the more likely you will be to knock them out during the time you have between meetings, lunch or major task work. If you don’t break down your tasks, they can be overwhelming and you’ll need to set aside large blocks of time to accomplish anything and you’ll miss out on the consolidation of actions offered by horizontal action management. Additionally, having a list of actions enumerated for each task allows you to assess your progress more often.

Putting It All Together

Both horizontal and vertical action management are effective tools, but they are most effective when used together. Typically, beginning with vertical action management can be helpful, because when you finish you’ll be able to see the common actions you need to consolidate in the horizontal action management stage.

While action management is time-consuming initially, it will save you time later and can help keep you focused while working on projects. Breaking tasks into steps will also help you understand what tasks need to be completed and how you should work on them. Finally, action management gives you a better appreciation of the scope of your tasks and how much time will be required for completion. With experience gained while using this approach, both your time estimates and productivity will soar.

Post by Brian J. Willet

Managing Actions Horizontally and Vertically is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Commitment Management

Jiri Novotny — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:06:39 +0000

The basic idea of Getting Things Done, or GTD, is not simply accomplishing the tasks you need to accomplish but doing so in an efficient manner. Obviously, the end product – a finished to-do list with all of your jobs well done – is essential to success, but the GTD methodology focuses more on the process than its product. As such, GTD is geared toward creating a system to manage your work that is self-sufficient and reduces your stress level rather than increase it. Creating such a to-do list is relatively easy when you’re using a good personal organizer.

Unfortunately, modern life presents with a dizzying array of commitments, both work-related and independent of work. Thus, a major component of GTD stressed by author David Allen is that of commitment management. Commitment management offers a way to clear your mind prior to taking on tasks so that you can focus all of your energy on the task at hand.

The first component: Identifying commitments

The first part of commitment management is essentially a brainstorming session in which you identify all of the commitments you have and put them on paper. These commitments can be new assignments or ongoing projects – “anything you consider unfinished in any way,” says Allen – and can be work for your boss or chores you need to do at home. Because these thoughts are cluttering your mind, merely thinking about them won’t help you focus on anything in particular. Instead, you need to put them into what Allen calls a “collection bucket,” and what we like to call a Swift To-Do List task list.

The key features of a “collection bucket” are that you can easily see all of the individual tasks and that you can revisit them whenever you need to. A Swift To-Do List 7 task list satisfies both of these, as the list is just a mouse click away. Using Swift To-Do List 7 actually improves upon the traditional “bucket” design thanks to the to-do list tree. You can create different lists and sub-lists to keep commitments organized. This is particularly helpful if you have multiple projects going on.

Virtually everyone has multiple projects – at minimum, you have your work and personal life. Both can be divided into additional sub-projects.

Second component: Clarifying commitments

According to Allen, the second part of commitment management is clarifying commitments and actions you need to take to complete them. This allows you to further free your mind and understand the scope of your projects. Swift To-Do List 7 is particularly well-suited to this task, as you can write notes and attach files to each of your tasks. This creates an individual workspace for each of your projects, so you’re not muddling your mind with ideas. And instead of worrying about jotting down new ideas on the nearest napkin, you have a place to keep things organized.

Swift To-Do List 7 allows you to attach not just text but images and files to each task in the notes area; consider using this option to create flow-charts or other visual aids to enhance your understanding of the requirements of each task.

The use of sub-lists can also help you plan ahead – further easing and clearing your mind for work – and assess your progress as you move toward your goals. In fact, being aware of your progress and the next step you need to take for any given task is essential to complete commitment management. If you fail to clarify the actions required, the uncertainty will remain on your mind and compromise your focus.

Third component: Creating organized reminder system

The third component of commitment management – and arguably the most important – is creating an organized reminder system that you can review whenever you need to. While you can rely on your brain for this, Allen notes that your brain’s reminder system is often inefficient and tends to kick in only after you needed to take action. Thankfully, Swift To-Do List 7 is tailored to take on this task as well.

Swift To-Do List 7 allows you to set reminders not just on your desktop but as e-mails as well, so even if you’re away from the office but have your mobile device, you can stay informed. This is particularly useful if you often travel for business or have a mixture of commitments in and out of the office. If you’re a freelancer or self-employed, e-mail reminders are invaluable, as your workplace is often mobile. Relying on an external reminder system can eliminate the distraction of trying to keep track of commitments in your mind.

Summary

While identifying absolutely every commitment at once would be ideal, it doesn’t often happen. But don’t be discouraged – remember that commitment management is an on-going process, so you can always add more later. This will ensure your mind is fresh and focused until you’ve checked all of the tasks off of your list.

(…) remember that commitment management is an on-going process, so you can always add more later (…)

Commitment management is a simple yet effective way to take the pressure of juggling all of your assignments off of your brain so you can be totally committed to the task at hand. All it takes is (1) identifying commitments; (2) clarifying completion requirements; and (3) creating an organized reminder system.

Post by Brian J. Willet

Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Commitment Management is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Perspective

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:05:52 +0000

Changing Your Perspective: From Primary Outcomes to the Big Picture

Getting Things Done is often touted as a revolutionary system, as it provides a significant departure from the productivity practices ingrained in the workplace. Obviously, overthrowing tools and methods that have been established as ‘the norm’ in offices around the country and world can be a hefty task, so it’s best to approach the task in manageable pieces. So where to begin? By changing your perspective.

Embracing the Big Picture

In the traditional work place, tasks are assigned as individual projects, completely out of the context of the larger overall project of which they are components. Assignments such as memos, spreadsheets and press releases are typically presented as existing in a vacuum, just one project afloat in a sea of unrelated work. And while this may seem to make work more manageable – you only have to think about the page in front of you – it’s actually doing you a disservice. One given document is merely an ingredient in the recipe that your company uses to present a finished product, so it should be treated as such.

As GTD author David Allen notes, “focusing on primary outcomes and values is a critical exercise,” but to be successful, you “must incorporate the results of big-picture thinking as well as the smallest of open details.”

In other words, you need to keep the overarching goals of your company (or business) in mind when you perform each task. By considering what place your assignment has in the larger scope of the project, you can refine your task and focus on what you need to do and what will be accomplished by other components of the project performed by your coworkers.

Big-Picture Benefits

This big-picture mindset can also take pressure off of you and open you up to more stress-free productivity. Altering your perspective – from seeing your task as the end-all, be-all to seeing it as a component in the scope of a larger project – can help alleviate anxiety and bring a feeling of teamwork into even your individual projects. The mindset can aid in promoting collaboration, which facilitates improved productivity and enhanced consistency with end products.

Collaboration is a breeze with Swift To-Do List 7, as you can assign tasks to others, email tasks to others, use notes to capture input from others, and utilize attachments to attach files (such as others’ work product) to tasks on your list. Since version 7.32, you can even create tasks from emails. Swift To-Do List 7 will also soon have full-blown online synchronization and collaboration feature (currently in beta).

From Outcomes to Inputs

But changing your perspective from focusing on small tasks in a vacuum to seeing them as part of the big picture can also work in terms of your own personal workflow. To help you make this transition, it may be helpful to adopt the vocabulary Allen uses in his book. The author classifies tasks as ‘inputs,’ which demonstrates the idea that your projects are means to an end, namely the company’s overall output. Your inputs are all interrelated and support overall project goals; this can be visualized easily with Swift To-Do List 7’s to-do list tree.

If that conceptualization doesn’t help, try a favorite of mine – consider your projects as ingredients in the overall recipe of your workflow.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The big-picture perspective is crucial because it promotes prioritizing in your workflow. For example, if you’re making chocolate chip cookies (trust me here, I have a lot of experience), some ingredients, such as flour and sugar, are more important than others, such as vanilla extract or chocolate chips. Thus, you need to dedicate more resources to the tasks that represent your flour and sugar, because if you concentrate too much on securing chocolate chips, you may not have dough in which to incorporate them.

Perspective-Promoting Tools

By using Swift To-Do List 7’s filtering feature and ability to view all tasks at once, you can more easily assess the big picture for a given span of time; the feature allows you to view tasks due only in certain time ranges. Additionally, you can assign priorities to each task and sort the list by priority, due date, task type or name for proper perspective. You can even sort the list by multiple columns at once (eg. by Priority first, and by Due Date second).

Often, your mindset can determine your overall productivity. And while it can be tempted to imagine every project as a massively important event, you should remember that completion of an input task is merely a primary outcome, a component of the big picture. This realization will help prevent you from doing overlapping work on multiple tasks and increasing your workload inadvertently.

Seeing your tasks in perspective as part of your Swift To-Do List can alleviate the anxiety associated with getting weighed down in the details of individual projects. GTD guru Allen suggests that a combination of a calendar, to-do list and priority coding are more effective in combination than when used individually, as you may still be susceptible to distraction and lack of appropriate focus. Thankfully, Swift To-Do List 7 incorporates these features and more into one convenient, streamlined piece of software.

Post by Brian J. Willet

Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Perspective is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Preview task recurrence, recur tasks after completion, and more in Swift To-Do List 7.33

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:36:46 +0000

The new Swift To-Do List 7.33 that we’ve just released includes lots of new stuff, including the ability to preview task recurrence, and recurrence after completion. See what’s new!

Note for Beta/Sync users: We’ve also released a new Beta with corresponding features.

Preview Recurrence

When you are feeling unsure when setting up a recurring tasks, this new feature can be of great help. The Recurrence tab in the Add Task and Edit Task windows now has a Preview link label. When you click it, you will be able to preview the recurrence times of that particular task.

The actual preview looks like this – it lists the next 10 dates when the task is going to recur. If the task will never recur, it will tell you, too.

Recurrence “After Completion”

We’ve added new task recurrence pattern, called “Recur After Completion”. Many of you have requested this kind of recurrence.

Basically, it regenerates the task X days after you’ve completed it.

You can use it in the Recurrence tab of the Add Task and Edit Task windows. As of now, you can configure how many days after the task is set done it should recur, and the ending date of the recurrence. The task always recurs at 5:00 AM.

Example: You create a new task and set it to recur 1 day after completion. You then set it as done later today (complete it). The task will recur tomorrow. And if you set it as done again 15 days after that, it will once again recur the next day. It will keep recurring as long as you keep setting it as done (unless you disable the recurrence).

You can find more info about recurrence (in general) in our Task Recurrence Guide.

Permanently delete to-do lists with Shift + Delete

You can use Shift + Delete in the to-do list tree to permanently delete to-do lists and any tasks in them. The difference between regular and permanent delete is that the permanent delete will not archive the tasks.

You can also use Shift + Delete in the task-view to permanently delete tasks.

Even though it is a permanent delete, you can undo this using the Undo feature.

Also, you don’t need to necessarily use Shift + Delete. You can also just hold down the Shift key, and use the “Delete” toolbar button or menu item.

Install without administrator privileges

The new version also comes with a new installer that doesn’t require administrator privileges. The installation is now even easier and faster. You can now install Swift To-Do List even on a non-admin Windows account.

“Collapse Tree” and “Expand Tree” now undoable

You can now undo the Expand Tree and Collapse Tree actions, using Edit – Undo.

Drag & Drop text into task-view

You can now drag & drop text (eg. from WordPad) into the task-view. This will open the Add Multiple Tasks window, or Add Task window if the text has just 1 line.

You can also paste the text into the task-view – this was possible even in older versions. Remember that the new versions also allow you to drag & drop emails into the task view to generate tasks.

Other fixes

As always, the new version also includes some misc. fixes and little improvements.

Your comments and questions

If you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to contact us! Just post in the comments below.

Preview task recurrence, recur tasks after completion, and more in Swift To-Do List 7.33 is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Turn emails into tasks – just drag & drop them into Swift To-Do List!

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:49:13 +0000

We’ve done it again. New Swift To-Do List version has been shipped, and it contains new exciting (and time-saving) feature. And there are even some fixes thrown in :-) We are still busy working on the online synchronization feature. This is just a little something to make the wait more pleasant.

You can now drag & drop emails into the task-view directly from your email program (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, The Bat! and possibly others). When you do that, magical wonders and miracles happen – the email is automatically converted into a task!

Lots of tasks come to our lives via email. This feature can be a considerable time saver.

But that’s not all! You will be also delighted to know that:

You can drag & drop multiple emails at once
Email subjects are used as task names
Email body is used as task notes
Email attachments are added as embedded task attachments
The email itself is added as an embedded task attachment, so you can easily open the email again, and reply to it from your email program
When dragging from Outlook, the notes will keep the HTML formatting, otherwise, the plain-text variant is used
You can also drag & drop .eml, .msg and .mim files directly into the task-view. This can be useful if your email client doesn’t support external drag & drop – simply export the messages to files, then drag & drop the files into Swift To-Do List.
When dragging from Outlook, you can drag & drop not just emails, but also Outlook tasks, and Outlook appointments
The original messages are left intact, of course. Swift To-Do List works with a copy.

When drag & dropping a single email, Add Task window will open, enabling you to tweak the task as needed before adding it. When drag & dropping multiple emails, they are added immediately. You can edit them with the Batch Edit feature via the right-click context menu.

Quick video demonstration

What if my email client isn’t supported?

Some email clients, like Pocomail or Evolution don’t support external drag & drop. However, despair not, as there is a remedy! You can simply export the email(s) from your email client to a .eml or .msg file. Then, drag & drop these files into Swift To-Do List.

What if I use web-mail only?

You can either start using a desktop email client, like Mozilla Thunderbird, or, if your web-mail supports export to .eml or .msg, you can save the emails to your HDD, then drag & drop the files into Swift To-Do List.

Feedback welcome

If you have any questions, suggestions or comments regarding this new feature, post them below.

Turn emails into tasks – just drag & drop them into Swift To-Do List! is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

The next actions and prioritizing

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:12:43 +0000

Effectively prioritizing is a very important skill to master in order to work efficiently. One of our customers, Gary, has been curious how I personally do this with Swift To-Do List. I’m going to share some techniques that I use myself in this post.

Next tasks

Next tasks are tasks that you are currently working on. You should always know what tasks to currently work on. At any given moment, you should be able to easily pull a list of these “next tasks”.

There are two main approaches that work well for me personally:

1. The “Next” priority: I’ve created a new priority called “Next”, and I’ve set it a bright green color. Now I always assign this priority to tasks that I want to complete today or in the next couple of days. I usually have around 5-20 tasks with this “Next” priority.

The downside is that these tasks are in various to-do lists, so I need to use the “View All To-Do Lists” view mode to view all tasks. Then, I either sort the tasks by priority to see what’s next, or use filter to display just the tasks with the “Next” priority.

2. The “Next” To-Do List: This is an alternative approach. In this case, I create a new to-do list called “Next”, and I drag & drop tasks that I want to work on now into it. The rest of my to-do lists act as a database (or library) of tasks that I pick tasks from.

The downside is that the tasks moved to the “Next” To-Do List will lose their original to-do list categorization. However, the upside is that it is ridiculously easy to display the list of next tasks, and I can also reorder the tasks in the list. Also, I usually delete the completed tasks anyway, so the loss of the original to-do list categorization is no big deal for me.

Next actions

Every of your tasks has a certain sub-tasks (or steps, or actions, however you call it). GTD (Getting Things Done) uses the term “Next action”.

It is very important to know the next step necessary for completion of any of the tasks you are currently working on.

Task notes are usually the most efficient way of recording the next actions. Simply write mini to-do list into the notes of the task you are currently working on. You can be very specific and write lots of details and thoughts. Once you complete any step, simply delete it from the task notes.

Since Swift To-Do List 9, you can create subtasks. You can now have the next steps in form of sub-tasks directly in the task-view. This is probably the most powerful approach.

Prioritizing in fast-paced environment

The above techniques of managing next tasks and next actions work pretty well in majority of cases. However, there is one exception.

Some complex tasks (eg. software development) are in constant shift, and you can complete literally over 50 small steps (sub-tasks) every day while working on such major task or project.

In such cases, I simply create a new memo for any complex task that I am currently working on. The large text area works great for “chaotic” and complex tasks that require a lot of thinking and are changing constantly. Memos give me a great deal of freedom and flexibility in these cases.

How about you?

Please don’t hesitate to share your own approach to prioritizing in the comments below.

The next actions and prioritizing is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks Explained (Finally!)

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:06:08 +0000

What Is a Reactive Task And What Is a Proactive Task?

The common definition is that a proactive task is a task that you want to do, and reactive task is a task that someone else wants you to do. However, this definition is not very useful.

Better definition would be: Proactive task is a task that is aligned with your long term-goals that has a strong long-term benefit, and reactive task is a task that brings very little long-term benefit. Reactive tasks are usually not results of planning, they are more likely to appear in the heat of the moment.

Reactive tasks make you living, proactive tasks make you successful.

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

Reactive and proactive tasks usually have these common characteristics. Study this comparison table carefully to fully understand and realize the differences:

Reactive Tasks	Proactive Tasks
Not important	Important
Seem to be urgent	Usually not urgent
Little or no long-term benefits	Significant long-term benefits
Come from the outside world	Come from you
Not planned by you	Planned by you
Results lose meaning quickly	Results don’t lose meaning
Likely to be done when you are procrastinating on proactive tasks	Likely to be procrastinated on
Pay off immediately (but not much)	Pay off over time (big time)
Boring, not exciting	Courageous, often exciting
Routine	Imaginative and creative
Safe	Scary
Feeling of overload	Feeling of accomplishment
Backward-looking	Forward-looking
80% of time is usually spent on them	20% time is usually spent on them
20% of time should be spent on them	80% of time should be spent on them
One-eyed (read on :-))	May be a part of a larger strategy

4-Quadrants Prioritizing and Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

There is an interesting connection here: 4-quadrants time management system allows you to quickly see the difference between reactive and proactive tasks.

Vast majority of urgent and not important tasks are reactive, and vast majority of important and not urgent tasks are proactive.

Another way to put it: Reactive tasks are usually not important, and proactive tasks are very important, especially in the long run.

If you would like to use the 4-quadrants time management with Swift To-Do List, please see the post “How to use 4-Quadrants Time Management using your own custom priorities“.

The Ideal Ratio of Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks

Perhaps that spending time strictly on proactive tasks is the holy grail of personal achievement, but it is not attainable for the most of us. However, spending 80% time on proactive tasks and just 20% of time on reactive tasks is a realistic goal that everyone can achieve. Once you achieve this balance, your life will be forever different – in the best possible way.

Why? Because you will be moving in the right direction, every day, every week, every month, every year, building your better life step by step. The results will stick. Every day will be better than the last one. Sure, there will be some up and downs, but the general trend will be unquestionable. Sky is the limit. But what is most important: You will slowly become your own boss.

Simple Exercise To Raise Your Awareness:

1. Go through your to-do lists and count all reactive tasks and all proactive tasks. (To get more accurate result, do NOT count everyday tasks that must be done regardless of other circumstances. Don’t count tasks like “feed the baby”, “buy groceries”, “get the velociraptor out of my bedroom” etc).

2. Now is the time to do the math and calculate the ratio:

Take the total number of reactive + proactive tasks (eg. 43 reactive and 15 proactive is 58 in total)
Divide it by 100 (you get 0,58 in this example)
Now divide the number of your reactive tasks by that number (eg. 43 / 0,58 = 74%)
Divide the number of your proactive tasks too (eg. 15 / 0,58 = 26%)

We just calculated that we are spending 74% of our time on reactive tasks and only 26% of our time on proactive tasks in our example. That’s not very good!

How To Spend More Time On Proactive Tasks

So you would like to spend more time on proactive tasks? Good! It’s not a rocket science. Here are some tips:

Can you eliminate some of the reactive tasks? Create new to-do list called “Never To-Do” and just move them there (if you are using Swift To-Do List, you can move the tasks there either simply using mouse drag & drop, or you can just cut them and then paste them in the new to-do list). See 5 Ways How To Deal With Low Priority Tasks for extra tips.
Can you create more proactive tasks? Ideally some tasks that you are passionate about. If you can come up with some tasks that create a burning desire inside you, you are on the right path.
Learn to say “No.” Being assertive is crucial. When someone delegates you a task that you don’t want to do, just say it outright. You have more important things to do.
Not all tasks from others are reactive – even tasks from others can be proactive, especially when they are aligned with your long-term goals. When you share your goals with your boss or business partner, proactive tasks come naturally. But, if you want something completely different than your boss, perhaps it’s the time to look for a new boss.

To get some ideas of proactive tasks, answer these questions: What are you always postponing? What are you (always) going to do later? What tasks spark up the most excuses? What you really want to do? It it’s not too late to do these things! Unfortunately, you might wake up one day and realize that it is indeed too late. You never know what’s around the corner. Seize the day! Do the meaningful work now. You can reap the fruits of your proactive work sooner than you think.

The Radical Way To See Procrastination

Procrastination is not bad because it makes you unproductive. In fact, it can make you very productive – for example, you can clean your whole apartment in record time when you are procrastinating, and do many other kinds of hard work.

Procrastination is bad because it makes you scared to do the truly important things (proactive tasks). It makes you the slave of the outside world. Also, you might not even realize that you are procrastinating.

So what is the link between proactive tasks and procrastination?

Whenever you are doing reactive tasks instead of proactive tasks, you are procrastinating.

You see, what procrastination does is this: It makes you do reactive tasks instead of proactive tasks, because they are easier, safer, and with immediate benefits. For all I know, you could add tasks like “Play PC games” to your to-do list together with other reactive tasks and complete them with great satisfaction and feeling of productivity. That’s how it works.

Procrastination is the one-eyed leader of your brain and body. It’s the last thing you need – what you really need is a commander in a plane that will allow you to see the broader context.

The One Crucial Thing You Might Not Realize

We are often plugging holes with reactive tasks in our lives. Only proactive tasks can offer the permanent solutions. Whenever a new reactive task comes to you, you should ask yourself – what could I do so tasks like this stop coming? The answer will give you an idea of proactive task that can permanently improve your life.

Reactive vs. Proactive Tasks Explained (Finally!) is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

How to fully focus on task at hand

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:28:01 +0000

We all occasionally want to finish some important task, yet are unable to fully focus on it due to various reasons. This post will give you some tips.

Why is it hard to focus

There are usually two main reasons why is it hard to focus: Suboptimal system of organizing your work, and distractions. Organizing your work is a breeze with our to-do list program. Distractions are whole another chapter.

Two ways of overcoming distractions

Are you spending too much time on Facebook or surfing the web? There is still hope! Basically, you can do two things about distractions: Eliminate them, or distract yourself from them :-). Let me explain – if you fully focus on something else, then the distractions can’t distract you anymore.

How to fully focus

The best way to fully focus on one important task (or multiple tasks – a short task list) is to print or write the task on a sheet of paper and place it in front of you. That way, whatever you do, you will always end up looking at the paper, which will make you remember that you have important task/tasks to do. Having something physical to remind you increases the urgency and seriousness – you simply can’t close the paper like a window on your computer screen. It stays there until you finish the task.

As an added bonus, the feeling of accomplishment is also far greater. Enjoy tearing the paper to little pieces when the task is done :-)

Swift To-Do List enables you to print just a single task (or multiple tasks), including notes and all important information about the task. Simply right-click the task, and select Print or Export Task(s)…:

When you print the task, you will literally transform it into a task at hand.

When all else fails, post a physical note directly to your computer screen. Why? There is no avoiding it. Even digital desktop sticky notes can be easily avoided, but not this one.

How to fully focus on task at hand is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

How to copy tasks in and out of Swift To-Do List

Jiri Novotny — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:32:44 +0000

Did you know that you can use clipboard (Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V) to copy tasks in and out of Swift To-Do List? It couldn’t be simpler.

How to copy tasks out of Swift To-Do List

Simply select some task(s) in Swift To-Do List, press Ctrl + C (or use Edit – Copy), and they will be copied to clipboard. Now you can paste them anywhere.

If you paste them outside the task management software, they will be pasted as a list of task names, one per line.

If you paste them back in Swift To-Do List (eg. in a different to-do list, or even the same one), they will be pasted as exact copies, retaining all fields, notes, attachments, reminders, recurrence, etc. Just the Creation Date and Change Date will be set to current date.

How to paste tasks into Swift To-Do List

You can either paste a single line of text into our task organizer, or multiple lines.

When pasting a single line in the task-view, Add Task dialog will be opened with task name prefilled with the text in clipboard. This also gives you the chance to edit the task fields and enter additional details.

However, when pasting multiple lines (eg. task list), Add Multiple Tasks dialog will be opened. You can edit the individual lines to make sure that only tasks that you want will be added. When you press OK, you can right click the freshly added tasks and use Batch Edit to specify the details of the tasks.

How to copy tasks in and out of Swift To-Do List is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

5 Ways How To Deal With Low Priority Tasks

Jiri Novotny — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:38:58 +0000

We all have lots of low priority tasks lying around our to-do lists that will probably never get done. You simply have much more important tasks to do first. New important tasks pop-up all the time, so it’s unlikely that you will ever get to your low priority tasks.

You might ask: “Do I even have to write the task down, if it’s not important?” The definitive and final answer to that is – maybe! :-)

Let me tell you why: If you are even considering writing the task down, then your subconsciousness has already identified the task as somewhat important, and the task would subconsciously bother you. If you write it down, your mind can discard it, as it knows that it’s safely stored in your to-do list program, and move on to more important stuff.

On the other hand, if you can consciously decide that doing the task would have zero or negative benefit, then it’s safe to not write it down, as you consciously know that you don’t even want to do it.

So, the promised 5 ways how to deal with low priority tasks. *drum roll*

1) Can you delegate it?

This is not really a solution, unless you have a very reliable person to delegate the task to. Otherwise, you have to create a task “Check that Wally has done Task X”. And besides, doesn’t Wally have something more important to do, like drinking coffee and eating donuts?

2) Will it resolve itself?

If you know that the task will take care of itself, then just skip writing it down and let it go.

This approach is not always wise, as some tasks “solve” themselves not the way you would like them to (eg. your bills will get paid with the friendly help of executor :-)). It’s important that you are sure the task is really of low priority before using this approach.

3) Do I even want to get this done?

As I’ve said above, if there is zero or negative benefit for completing the task, then just move on.

4) Is it really low priority?

Sometimes you might label important tasks that you are not feeling like doing as low priority. That’s a really bad habit! If the task is important, admit it. Don’t run away from the truth.

Also, sometimes it is likely that finishing a task will have zero benefit, but it might also pay of handsomely. Eg. calling a client might likely not result in more business for you, but what if he places a huge order? (Now or in the future, because you’ve called him today)

5) Write it down and forget it

That’s my favorite way of dealing with unimportant tasks. I recommend creating a new to-do list just for tasks like this. You can name the to-do list something like “Maybe”, “Future”, “Procrastination Ideas” or “Never to-do” :-).

Alternative approach: Place the low priority tasks in your normal to-do lists, and get them out of your sight, either by sorting your to-do list by priority (from Highest to Lowest), or using filters (eg. you can create a new filter preset that will automatically hide all unimportant tasks).

Did you know that you Swift To-Do List 7 allows you to fully customize priorities? For example, you can delete or rename the default “Low” and “Lowest” priorities. Read more about it in our previous blog post: How to use 4-Quadrants Time Management using your own custom priorities

Don’t let low priority tasks undermine your productivity!

Having lots of low priority tasks that never get done haunting you can be *really* demotivational. I hope that this post has given you some insight into this issue and ideas how to deal with them.

5 Ways How To Deal With Low Priority Tasks is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

Swift To-Do List Blog » task management

“Touch it once” – Why being picky destroys your productivity

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How to use Due Dates in your to-do list correctly

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Endless to-do list

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Swift Mind Freedom released!

Who is Swift Mind Freedom for?

What will I gain from Swift Mind Freedom?

What are the contents?

How does Swift Mind Freedom compare to other books?

How much does it cost?

Where can I purchase the book?

Will there be a sequel?

I love feedback!

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Your action steps

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How to murder your productivity

Check email 50 times a day to prevent focus

Clutter your desk with piles of paper for constant anxiety

Sit in a crappy chair for physical fatigue and tiredness

Multi-task to decrease your IQ by 10 points

Get as many notifications as possible for constant distraction

Be interrupted as often as possible to avoid getting in the flow

Build the longest to-do list in the known universe for guaranteed stress

In case you couldn’t tell, I am joking. (Or am I?)

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New Swift To-Do List 7.60: Calendar Panel, add tasks from any application, more!

New calendar panel

New info panel

New task-view header

Add tasks from any application

HTML emails when emailing tasks

Attachments can be renamed

More features coming!

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1. Make sure your work is left unfinished

2. Begin with the least urgent task

3. Schedule the fun first

4. Work less to get more done

5. If everything is on fire, go for a walk

What works for you?

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Putting It All Together

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The first component: Identifying commitments

Second component: Clarifying commitments

Third component: Creating organized reminder system

Summary

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Getting Things Done (GTD) Tutorial: Perspective

Changing Your Perspective: From Primary Outcomes to the Big Picture

Embracing the Big Picture

Big-Picture Benefits

From Outcomes to Inputs

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Perspective-Promoting Tools

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Preview task recurrence, recur tasks after completion, and more in Swift To-Do List 7.33

Preview Recurrence

Recurrence “After Completion”