how to catagortise regular habits

J

junkone

Guest
for eg. once a year, i should do taxes, health check up,
every 2 months, haircut, car maintenace, etc. any ideas would be appreciated. i am trialling the outlook add in and am wondering how to categorise these kinda items.
 

sdhill

Registered
junkone;56624 said:
for eg. once a year, i should do taxes, health check up,
every 2 months, haircut, car maintenace, etc. any ideas would be appreciated. i am trialling the outlook add in and am wondering how to categorise these kinda items.

Why don't you just 'tickle' these items? Things like this I place on my calendar in Outlook as all day events. I see them coming as part of my weekly review.

Simon
 
S

scott.stephen

Guest
43 Folders & Checklists

I would say that depending on the item and frequency, that a mix of the 43 Folders system and checklists should help you with this.

Checklists for things that you want to do every morning for example.

43 Folders for single items that have a more distant recurrence is a good solution.

Hope this helps,
Scott STEPHEN
O&A Coaching
Efficacité et productivité sans stress
http://www.oeta.fr
 

madalu

Registered
A slightly different idea:

I have a special category of "maintenance" projects--i.e., stuff in my life that I have to do regularly for the indefinite future. Here are a few examples:

keep house clean
keep car in good shape
maintain slick hairdo
(etc.)

When I review my "maintenance" project list, I immediately think of a bunch of related next actions: bring car to car wash, vacuum living room, etc. I prefer to use project lists for this rather than automatically recurring events in a computer program because it forces me to think of exactly what needs to get done now. (Let's say my hair grew slowly during the last two months; I don't want to get reminders to get a haircut if I don't need one yet. But I do want to be reminded to buy new hair product if I need it.)

Less frequent stuff such as taxes (once a year) would go in the tickler/calendar.
 

nanotech

Registered
Hmm...I never thought of it that way, maintenance items. I did like the others and used tickler files. However, dentists appointments perhaps you can do that with because they occur every so often, but I like the idea of "keep car clean." I find myself thinking about and spending some time every now and then about when I am going to wash my car, sometimes about when I am going to clean my room, etc.

Having a maintenance file like that might help, maybe one for house, one for car, one for body (which would include hair, face, etc).

We need more clarification on this, I want to know if anybody else is doing it this way.
 

abhay

Registered
Fronts

Yes, I do it the same way. I have a list called 'fronts' in which I put such items. I look at it in the weekly review, just for triggering actions or projects. In fact that's just what DA calls 'Areas of Responsibility', which just a level higher than projects (20000, I suppose?).

Abhay
 

John Ismyname

Registered
for eg. once a year, i should do taxes, health check up,
every 2 months, haircut, car maintenace, etc. any ideas would be appreciated. i am trialling the outlook add in and am wondering how to categories these kinda items.
As this post originated with how to do this in Outlook, I'm addressing it using this platform.

Start a task directory called "Repetitive Admin Tasks" which can hold many such tasks. Some can repeat a specific time duration after the last one was complete. I use this for "haircut" every month and "call garage fo appointment for oil change" every three months. Birthdays go here too. For 90% of these its "Call Fred to wish him a happy birthday" on the actual date. For others, its "buy and send Ethel a birthday card" a week before their actual birthday. Because these are stored in a separate directory, you don't see them until you need to do the task. You also don't even think about them as you have put them into a trusted GTD system :)


Keep your context (@) lists as contacts in Outlook-contacts by putting the name of this list in the "Company Name" field and the list contents in the "Notes" field. For example, I have my @ Saturday Chores list. This list includes (weekly) car maintenance, laundry, and specific housecleaning chores.

I create an Outlook Task called "Saturday Chores". As you might guess, this is a task that repeats weekly every Saturday. It is 2.5 hours in duration and a high-priority. In the bottom of an Outlook-task is the "Contacts" field. You can link this to you @ item in contacts. This is useful because you can re-assign from a task to a calendar item easily.


My philosophy is to get my professional work done Mon-Fri, my personal work done on Saturday and keep Sunday free. (This is for pragmatical reasons not religious.) It can't be a calendar item because it does not have to be done on a particular time or particulate day but it does have to be done. I like doing them all at once so that I know what my total time allotment is. It has to be high-priority because Saturday is the most ideal day to do it. However, i can't put it in my calendar because it's not a fixed commitment. if not Saturday then Sunday ...maybe. If not Sunday... it doesn't get done! A high priority task for a Saturday with a batch-list of these household tasks is the only way I can do these otherwise low priority tasks!

Also, I multi-task while I do these chores by listening to pod-casts as my @ Saturday Chores are the mindless, habitual that I don;t want to or can't pay anyone to do.
 

Jodie E. Francis

GTD Novice
I track these 'maintenance' items as variously recurring tasks in a 'Routines' project. I find it more effective than a checklist because I don't have to think about when to do the task again (like change the furnace filter) - it is completely off my mind knowing my system will remind me. I also time block a couple of hours each week to address whatever routine tasks are due.
 

John Ismyname

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It occurred to me that, by their very nature, good and bad habits are invisible to us as we don't think about them. This is very different from an infrequent task. One of my habits is to "eat healthy", I don't think about it, which is good but I don't consider what my definition of eating healthy is or how that may have changed. decades ago, a boss wanted employees to track how we spend our time incrementally. One particular employee noted he started on "Project A" at 9:00am. I thought to myself "Your HABIT is to arrive at the office at about 9:10a everyday, take your coat off, go to the bathroom, get a coffee. By the time you start working; it's 9:30." This employee was compelty oblivious to this habit. Likewise, I thought the boss seemed oblivious to late arrivals if such time sheets were actually looked at. I feel like the pot calling the kettle black as I have gone from "processing my email inbox to zero" to drifting into this discussion...
 

ellobogrande

Registered
Sorry to open this thread again ten years(!) later, but this link no longer works, and I'm very interested in implementing just this sort of thing—a way to accomplish daily, weekly, monthly etc. tasks.

I haven't been on the forum for some time. I came back just to see what people have posted lately and found this thread at the top of the list. Wow! I wish I could remember what I wrote ten years ago! It's unfortunate that the thread is gone.

My methods have changed since then because I'm not using the same tools as I did before. Back then I was using Outlook and a Windows Mobile PDA. Today I'm using an Android smartphone and have all of my lists in Google.

As much as possible I schedule my next appointment for regularly-recurring things like haircuts, dental cleanings, and chiropractor visits at the end of each visit so I never have to track reminders to call and make appointments later.

In my experience, you don't need to or even should track all of your recurring work in the same manner. Some things are better suited to a calendar, a tickler file or a checklist. I put recurring events on my calendar for date-specific things like changing filters.

I use checklists to track some recurring actions (monthly, quarterly, etc). I put reminders on the calendar to review them and manually retype relevant items on my action lists. Those lists are getting smaller, though as I've switched more to calendar-based reminders (e.g. "Time for annual A/C service" on April 1 each year). My mind knows what to do with that - add "Call XYZ for A/C service appointment" to @Calls. However, I do something different with housekeeping items (I've been experimenting for a long while).

Other things like housekeeping items (dust furniture, clean shower, etc.) I track in a checklist app called ChoreChecklist by DotNetIdeas. Items on these lists are things I'd ideally do at specified intervals, but if I miss it's not the end of the world. The neat thing about ChoreChecklist is that I can create routines that automatically uncheck items after periods of time go by, it shows me when I last completed tasks and what's overdue so I can prioritize those items appropriately when I have discretionary time. The downside is that I have to remember to look at it in addition to my action lists and I often don't. I also have to remember to check things off when I mindlessly clean this or that in the house, and I may have made it so granular that it's lost its usefulness. I've added ".See Chore Checklist" at the top of my @Home list to help, but I still don't look at it much. That's probably why I don't track things like changing filters in that app. Also, since I've hired a housekeeper, I don't have to track so many things now because they are done for me every two weeks. If you have the means, I strongly recommend that. It's made my life a *lot* easier.

I hope some of this helps. Best of luck!
 

John Ismyname

Registered
I track these 'maintenance' items as variously recurring tasks in a 'Routines' project. I find it more effective than a checklist because I don't have to think about when to do the task again (like change the furnace filter) - it is completely off my mind knowing my system will remind me. I also time block a couple of hours each week to address whatever routine tasks are due.
Jodie, this is a great example of what I mean. I schedule changing my furnace filter as a task (in Outlook) that auto-regenerates every 3 months. While my @ Saturday chores are, theoretically, a GTD project, I prefer a singular check list task. If I were to break this out into separate tasks, there would be a temptation not to complete all of these mundane tasks because "I can do them later". The "all or nothing" aspects of the check list reminds me that Saturday is indeed the best time to do laundry and that it's an all-or-nothing. That said, your method of your "Routine" project would be great if these tasks stretched over more than a few days and/or more than one location.

On a more serious usage, there are certain things I do on the first day of the month. My favorite is to do my invoicing so I get paid :) No one is going to contact me and say "Where is my invoice, I want to pay you!" It's also a great day to reconcile my bank statements from the previous month.
 

Jodie E. Francis

GTD Novice
It sounds like this is an example of how different approaches work for different people. :)

For me, Saturday chores must be structured in such a way that I can do them now or later - like ellobogrande says, if I miss them it's not the end of the world - so they are intentionally listed as separate independently recurring tasks for me rather than as a single checklist. When I had a Chores checklist it was never complete, which I found discouraging. It also didn't track completion dates correctly (it was all or nothing, vs dates for each task).

I have a project of Routines (weekly, monthly, quarterly), and a sub-project for Chores. Chores are typically done around the house on weekends, and the list is shared with my husband. This approach keeps these items separate from my project-related work. When the 'cleaning bug' strikes, typically on Saturday but perhaps on my day off, I will knock off several chores from my Chores list (GTD purists wanting to mimic this approach would use a Chores context). So satisfying!

If the weekend is particularly busy and Monday arrives with some chores undone, I'll renegotiate the remaining ones - Todoist makes it easy to defer them and get them out of my face until next weekend. Unlike for John_Ismyname, my chores are certainly not 'all or nothing'. DH washed the kids' sheets? Great! Towels not washed? Ok, I'll do them Tuesday after 7pm when the rates go down. Toilets not cleaned? No worries, they'll wait until next week ;)

Invoicing would certainly be an 'all day' calendar item for me, to ensure it gets done on the first of the month. Reconciling my bank statements is on my monthly Routines list, and rather than let it get old I will defer it if time passes & it appears I'm not going to get to it this month.
 

Jodie E. Francis

GTD Novice
Re-reading my response, it looks like I'm using my Chores project as a powerful checklist, where items can be completed and recur independently of each other rather than only at the list level. We each have different needs and our tools have different capabilities, so our implementations vary. :)
 

John Ismyname

Registered
It sounds like this is an example of how different approaches work for different people. :)
...
Unlike for John_Ismyname, my chores are certainly not 'all or nothing'. DH washed the kids' sheets? Great! Towels not washed? Ok, I'll do them Tuesday after 7pm when the rates go down.
There are definatley different ways to do household chores! I need the 'all or nothing' or they don't get done. Like Jodie, I live in the
governmental jurisdiction with reduced hydro rates at certain times ... and the highest hydro rates in North America. It is cost-effective to time my laundry chore around the lowest hydro rates. My wife masterminds housecleaning. If I don't do my chores when I say I will, my wife will do them...and I will loose some credibility with her.

In a broader sense, there are always consequences when we fail to meet our deadlines. Otherwise, they would not be deadlines. Sometimes, this consequence is a subtle loss of credibility.
 

Oogiem

Registered
Interesting the differences in chores. I have tried many different systems for managing basic household chores and none really work. Mostly because I can always find things that I consider more important than a clean house. :) My approach is lots of little recurring chores because at least I see them as a nag and they tend to get done more frequently that way. Just as an aside, in our house we try to schedule all uses of electricity on sunny days. We're grid tied solar PV and we produce more electricity than we use on a yearly basis. If we run over in a given day we pay full retail rates but if we put more into the grid we are paid wholesale rates. So our best use is to use as much of the on-site production as we can and only feed true excess to the grid. We even purchased enough clothes so that if we have a stretch of cloudy days we can avoid laundry for a couple of weeks to take advantage of the sun.
 
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