PM Drowning in ToDos
My friend was drowning in todo items. She felt like if one more software development task came her way that her head would explode.
One more unanswered email in her inbox then she would have to declare email bankruptcy…
Then another meeting to change the requirements drove her off the deep end.
It was impossible to manage the project with a mind full of tasks undone – just couldn’t focus enough….
…No matter how much coffee she drank.
Concentration vs Overwhelm
We all know that planning a project requires concentration – to be in the flow.
And that concentration needs a mind empty of other distractions, no matter how important they are outside of the current piece of work.
We have all been there. ToDo overwhelm. Inbox bloat. Requirements confusion. Mental blurring instead of sharpness.
Perhaps you have thumbed through David Allens famous book. You know, “Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”.
It sounded good. You implemented GTD, you wanted Inbox Zero, clear reqs. In your mind you were a calm Jedi Knight of project productivity.
Only the project management tools you used didn’t work the way you wanted them to.
- Kinda got in the way of productivity.
- Or it was too clunky to use day to day.
- You couldn’t share parts of it with other team easily.
- Or it felt like too much extra work.
Me too! I have been through a lot of task organizing systems over the years. Then last week I came across another task system. There was a free offer for one year of service. I figured I’ll try it out, perhaps I will like it.
I didn’t like it. I loved it!
Conscious task management
So much that I wrote a detailed review on the TeraTech blog. I think it might help you too to be more productive and less stressed over todos. Make keeping requirements organized a snap. Able to be more conscious of my tasks.
And it has made it easy for me to do my weekly GTD task reviews, delegate tasks successfully (love the @person tag feature for that) and focus on just the tasks I am currently doing by using # tags.
I love that it is lightweight UI and that I got writing real task lists with it within 2 minutes of running it with their explainer video/training mode. Check it out and let me know what you think of it.
And if you have other ways of organizing your todos, task and reqs I would love to hear about those too.
