Become a Task Warrior!

[ekianjo]

Here's an introduction on how to be effective with to-do lists, and how to use Task Warrior if this is the tool of your choice (which happens to be on Pandora as well)

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[PowerGod]

Finally I can do my things in the bathroom in the right way !! Thank you !!

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Oh!  How I hate those dump SMART Goals my job makes me come up with every damn year!   Hope this task warrior of yours can make these dump SMART goals smart

 

[Fzero]

yeah my work uses SMART goals too for a couple years or so now.

Nice article though and sounds like a nice program

 

[ekianjo]

SMART is just a way to easily remember how you should describe stuff you have to do in order to make them come true. I don't have any "hate" against them, on the contrary I believe they are extremely useful to frame things in a simple way.

Let me know what your experiences with to-do lists are  

 

[hedwards]

I find that these sorts of systems are for people that don't have a real problem with task management. As in, they're people that can keep track of where they are in the process and just need a tool to assist.

Anyways, good luck with this. For those of us that can't break down tasks without great effort, things like this are of very, very little help.

 

[ekianjo]

For those of us that can't break down tasks without great effort, things like this are of very, very little help.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that breaking down tasks is a very natural thing to do, and I would classify it under "common sense", since you don't need any particular knowledge or skills to be able to break down tasks into small pieces. You just need to project yourself and imagine the process and write it down.

Of course, if you are talking about very complex goals to achieve, then it's a totally different story, but most of the short term goals I work with can be broken down in 5 steps or less.

 

[hedwards]

For those of us that can't break down tasks without great effort, things like this are of very, very little help.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel that breaking down tasks is a very natural thing to do, and I would classify it under "common sense", since you don't need any particular knowledge or skills to be able to break down tasks into small pieces. You just need to project yourself and imagine the process and write it down.

Of course, if you are talking about very complex goals to achieve, then it's a totally different story, but most of the short term goals I work with can be broken down in 5 steps or less.

I've got ADHD. Trying to break tasks down is extremely hard as there's no ordering to it. If I want to take something and work on it by parts, the only thing that works is asking a friend to help me create a checklist. And even then, it's hard to remember that I've got a todolist that I'm supposed to be working from.

I think this is one of the major differences between left brain sequential thinking and right brain non-linear thinking. It's not just that I have a problem with breaking tasks down into parts, it's that even if I do manage that, I'm then left with a large number of subtasks that don't relate to each other in a way that I can grasp.

It's related to convergent versus divergent thinking, the longer I think about something, in most cases, the more options I find, not fewer. And generally the options appear to me in a random order, rather than in any predictable pattern.

 

[ekianjo]

I've got ADHD. Trying to break tasks down is extremely hard as there's no ordering to it. If I want to take something and work on it by parts, the only thing that works is asking a friend to help me create a checklist. And even then, it's hard to remember that I've got a todolist that I'm supposed to be working from.

I see. Well in that case it's probably very difficult to function in a task-orientated manner. My job actually relates to ADHD therapy (I can't give more details here), so I'd be interested to hear what works for you to get things done - if you don't mind sharing.