Routine Reminders/palm tickler - good for household stuff

[helenjc]

My household is in a bit of chaos and I looked at the fly lady ideas and found it not quite my 'style' - I know it works well for a lot of people - however I can't stand the thought of those cards - more paper ) besides I am in love with my Tungsten and couldn't believe she/it couldn't solve my lack of routine for me.
I think I've found a solution that will work for me so thought to share it. I knew that I was needing reminders to do things on a regular basis - otherwise I was finding they were being ignored on the domestic side but I didn't want to have the reminders overflowing on my daily work/family schedule.
I set up a separate key suite folder of tasks and just entered the tasks in as recurring - new folder called routine reminders. As it is a non primary folder in outlook I don't get outlook alarms and I"m happy with that - but the palm does ring bells and tell me 'change sheets - kids bedrooms' - and with keysuite I can also regenerate the task after completion if it is not critical that it be done on a certain day of the week. eg I might clean my oven once a month but it doesn't have to be a saturday....so i just regenerate 1 month after completion.
Sorted by due date, it's an easy system so far and hope it continues to work.
cheers
Helen

 

[cris]

Re: Routine Reminders/palm tickler - good for household stu

I am in love with paper. I collect it in fact, and I'm an origami enthusiast. So there are no PDAs in my future.

I was going to explain another thing I do with my recurrent task system, which might also work with yours.

In my card file, I have cards that remind me to spend time in a particular context. In particular, I have cards for making phone calls and doing paperwork. Otherwise I would manage to avoid those contexts for weeks on end. I don't work on Tuesdays, so Tuesday mornings are devoted to phone calls. For someone else this might be overkill, but it's what I have to do. These are household-related calls such as calling to get estimates for home/landscape maintenance, scheduling/rescheduling appointments for self and kids, ordering things over the phone, calling bankers, lawyers, accountants, whatever. I usually don't make personal calls from work.

I'm thinking that in the future I won't need to do this. Part of the reason I have to do it this way right now might be that I still have a backlog of stuff from before I converted to this system. But it has helped me reduce the backlog considerably, from over 50 phonecalls to under 20.

Cris

 

[Anonymous]

Flying with my PDA

I've been working this through with my PDA (I use a pocket PC) as well.
What I've been doing is setting up appointments for the Zones. A week long All day appointment for this week is Zone 4 - Master Bedroom. This shows on the top of my day all week, that way I know where my focus should be.

Hope this helps.

Christine

 

[Ambar]

Just to clarify, the Flylady (http://www.flylady.net/) system doesn't require cards -- it's a modification of the Pam & Peggy "SHE" system, which does.

My Flylady adaptation is all Palm and Life Balance. I have one calendared task per week, which happens on Sunday - this tells me which zone to work in.

Each zone task has various children, which are Next Actions. (Dust ceiling fan, clean window, vacuum baseboards, etc.) I work my way through these during the week. Breaking down "clean living room" into more specific Next Actions really helped make the job manageable, knowing that I never have enough free time to do the job as a block. People who have more free time or are less intimidated might not need the breakdown.

At the end of the week, I check off that zone and start on the next one. Everything repeats monthly, and the house stays sanitary enough to suit me.

 

[aderoy]

Routine Reminders/palm tickler - good for household stuff

There is a handy little program for the Palm called CheckList Lite. Allows for tasks to be grouped, and checked / cleared as needed. The help screen show it came from: http://www.mobilegeneration.com if that helps.

In it I keep my Daily / Weekly / Monthly tasks for the servers I manage. Since you can see what was done / not done in the routine it makes my review at the end of day much easier - know what is left. Does not sync to the desktop.

Of course the use of DateBk5 / Agendus / Shadow / Bonasi etc with repeating todo's work.

Side note Manana is used for Someday/Maybe, holding bin for NextActions that I can move to tasks when they become 'active'.