Ideademic

Do you ever have trouble keeping your to-do list organized and manageable? Here’s a technique that’s been working for us over the past few months.

We keep our to-dos in Backpack because it’s where all our project information lives, it’s viewable and editable by both of us and it’s web-based, so we can get to it anywhere.

Instead of a to-do list per project or page topic (tried that) we find it useful to have all of our actionables in one place.

Instead of a big long list for Jacob and another long list for me (tried that too) we’ve been more productive with a week view that “rolls” with us.

Keep in mind the basic GTD concept of breaking your work into granular actionable tasks. (Then actually do them.)

1. Make a New Page just for your to-dos. Title the page 2008 To-do so that it stays at the top of your list of pages in the sidebar.
2. Create Dividers for each day of the week. These don’t ever get rearranged.
3. Create a List for each person and title it with their name.
4. Add your tasks.
5. That’s it.

Yes, we realize that’s uber simple, but that’s the point.

With the ajaxy sweetness in Backpack, it’s easy to move items up and down within your week so planning collaboratively is quick and painless. Also nice is the ability to assign a task to someone else simply by adding it directly to their list.

What do you think? Could this work for you too?