What a to do!

My new favorite To Do list.

So, yesterday I was telling you about the miracle of getting back to getting things done.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to decide to do things.

But I am a big believer in To Do lists, and I have been on a perpetual quest for the one perfect To Do list software. I’ve used the Task List in my Palm Pilot. I’ve used my Blackberry (forget that one!). I’ve used a word processor. I’ve used a spreadsheet. I’ve used Personal Brain–which is good for organizing information but not so good for a To Do list. I’ve tried Remember the Milk and other online solutions.

Lately, I’ve been using followupthen.com to get emailed reminders, and I like it. It’s a fast way to schedule follow ups, especially on anything that hits your email inbox.

But it’s not a To Do list.

Back when I was working, I made my own project management software using Microsoft Access. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t perfect. Mostly because I didn’t invest the time to make it better.

Now, lo and behold! Efficient To Do List from Efficient Software does almost everything I want a To Do List to do.

I can organize tasks by any hierarchy of categories I want. I can set due dates and reminders. I can sort by task, by category, by due date. I can sort by priority. And I can check off things that are done and watch them disappear from the list.

Downsides are limited documentation and help features. The priority list isn’t flexible enough for me. I’ve invented a way around that. Occasionally, assigning tasks to Groups (categories) is a bit slow.

Also, this is a Windows product. Mac users may be out of luck.

Considering I paid less than $15 for it, I find all of those caveats acceptable.

And I am getting things done!

Maybe you can, too.

Miracles

Never cease.

I’m back!

I said I would be if I had anything to say.

Two miracles to report this Monday. One is from a while ago. And one just happened.

The “while ago” miracle was in August. I became a produced playwright. This is a dividing line. There are the writers who write plays. And there are the writers who get them produced. Once you cross the threshold, you can never go back. (Not that you would want to.)

Anyway, I wrote an adaptation of The Looking Glass by Edith Wharton. It was produced by The Wharton Salon on the grounds of The Mount, Ms. Wharton’s Berkshire mansion.

Just getting a production is a miracle. But mine didn’t end there.

Because it could have been bad. It’s a one-woman show, and we lost our one woman about a week before we opened. (Health reasons. She’s fine now!)

Producer, director, everybody scrambling for a replacement.

And, the collateral miracle…they found Jane Nichols. The amazing Jane Nichols. Who came in late in the day, and saved it.

Jane gave a marvelous performance. Eternal gratitude? The term was invented for what we owe Jane.

It’s not easy coming into a one-person show at the last minute, learning pages of dialogue with no fellow actors to help you out if you stumble.

But she did it…and beautifully!

Audiences loved her. They loved the play.

Thanks to Edith Wharton, Jane Nichols, director Daniela Varon, and producer Catherine Taylor-Williams of The Wharton Salon, I am not only a produced playwright, but a beautifully produced one.

So, that’s the first miracle. Long overdue for a mention in this blog.

The second one is that I am back on track wrestling the To Do List from Hell into submission. I’m getting stuff done! I’ll tell you tomorrow about the software that’s helping me do it!

Right now, I have to get back to that To Do List.

Happy anniversary!

And goodbye.

Okay. Not really goodbye.

But today is the one year anniversary of this blog. (Cake!)

When I set out, I wasn’t sure I could manage a daily blog for six weeks let alone six months. When I made it to the six month mark, I wondered if I could manage a year.

When I hit the three-quarter mark, I realized that the mental overhead of coming up with something to write every day for the rest of my life and then writing it was probably not really how I wanted to be spending my time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do hope to be writing most days, if not all, for the rest of my life. But I have decided that is more likely to happen if I turn my attention back to fiction or playwriting and away from blogging.

I’m not closing down the blog.

I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten, and I’ve loved having subscribers. Even if some of you are ignoring the daily invasion of your inbox—(I know, I’ve subscribed to some blogs, too. There isn’t always time to read them all)—I have enjoyed the feeling that we are communicating. It has been a privilege to be allowed to enter there.

Thank you for your attention.

The blog will stay open. I just won’t be posting daily. You may not hear from me for days, weeks, months. But, who knows? If I have something to say, I’ll speak up.

If you’ve signed up for the RSS feed or the email subscription, you’ll know when that happens.

The rest of you are welcome to subscribe now or pop back in here from time to time to check.

It’s been fun! I’m proud to know that I managed it 365 days in a row.

So here is the final entry for Smith Sundays.

Elaine Smith—once upon a time, she wrote a blog post every day for a whole year!

Don’t tell me it’s not time for cake!

Mind Mapping

A cartographer’s nightmare.

Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique used by artists, advertisers, programmers and members of countless other disciplines.

It’s a way to visualize connections among and between things. It’s a way to chart the flow of a process, of a story, of an idea.

I like mind mapping and project management software. For a while now, I have been partial to Personal Brain software—now, I guess, called just The Brain. It’s a great way to tie together a lot of disparate items, allowing you to link to web pages, photographs and other files, notes, etc.

It’s fairly resource intensive, eating up your RAM and disk space, though, to say nothing of the overhead in maintaining it if you really want to use it well.

Still, I like it—if only for the pleasure of saying, “hold on a minute while I open up my brain.”

But I found a simpler, web-based mind mapping tool at bubbl.us.

It’s very easy to use with clear and simple directions.

So, get on over there and start planning your next novel.

Five minutes

That’s all.

Got a goal you’re having trouble achieving?

See if a timer will help you.

Procrastination.

It’s hard work to write a novel, keep a house clean, make a painting. We don’t like to get started because it commits us to a long process. But most of us can face five minutes of anything.

So, start small.

Write for five minutes. Dust for five minutes. Paint for…well, ok, painting might need larger chunks of time. There’s a lot of prep and a lot of clean-up. But the principle is the same.

If you set a timer, you have an exit strategy. You can begin already knowing that you don’t have to continue for the rest of your life. No matter how horrible the task becomes, there is an end point.

I love timers.

Quite often, when they go off, I am interested and immersed in what I am doing, and I continue on beyond the beep, beep, beep. But I don’t have to, and that can make all the difference between getting started on something or spending another half day on Facebook. (Now, there’s another use for a timer. Use it to limit those time-wasting activities!)

It doesn’t really matter what interval you use in setting the timer. If you can face thirty minutes of housework, go for it. The point is just to go into any task for which you are experiencing reluctance with an escape hatch.

Maybe, when the timer goes off, you’ll want to continue. Maybe not. Either way, you’re some number of minutes closer to your goal.

You can get timers in any dollar store, Radio Shack, grocery store. It’s nice to have several actual physical timers that you can keep in strategic areas of the house and move around as necessary.

Until you lay in a supply, however, you can use this one:

E.ggtimer.com

Go ahead.

Start that novel.

Just five minutes.

The King is dead

Long live the King!

Okay. That is a much-exaggerated headline. (I’ve been watching Edward the Seventh on Netflix so you’ll have to forgive the royalist hyperbole. And, may I say—just as an aside—that I had no idea Queen Victoria was such a shrew!)

Anyway, today’s post is about a Friday Find that pleases me immensely.

Once upon a time, before Blackberrys and iPhones, I had a Palm Pilot. (I still have it. I just don’t use it much. Its battery life is practically non-existent at this point, and I haven’t gotten around to finding a replacement.)

I loved the Palm.

Best calendar, address book and task list I’ve yet seen. Entry by handwriting instead of tiny, thumb-driven keyboard.

A lovely instrument. (I must see about that battery.)

Of particular use to me was the task list. It was so easy to categorize items, to schedule them as single or recurring tasks, to make them provide audible and insistent reminders,and, most importantly, to reschedule without having to enter them anew.

Nothing since the Palm has measured up. (We will not even discuss the Blackberry’s feeble ToDo list.)

Until now.

There’s a free, web-based app that comes very close.

FollowUpThen

It’s totally email based. I can send an email to remind me to write a blog post to tomorrow@followupthen, and I will get a reminder emailed to me tomorrow. I can specify a particular date and/or time. I can choose a specific interval—say, 3 hours or 4 days or 2 weeks. I can create a recurring reminder—every Tuesday, every week, every month. I can create a task which will nag me every 24 hours until I mark it complete.

In addition, I can forward emails I’ve received and get them back at a more appropriate time for follow up. I can blind copy emails I send and be reminded to check with others.

It is the closest I’ve yet found to the—for me—nearly perfect task list functionality of my late, lamented Palm.

The only things it’s missing are the ability to organize upcoming tasks by category, the audible alerts, and an easy way to print the whole list.

The only risks to it seem to be that of any web-based app. The creators could decide to start charging for the base service instead of the premium, or they could suddenly stop supporting it. With software that you purchase or are otherwise allowed to own, you can use it forever—or until your computer dies and you are forced to upgrade to an incompatible operating system. (Anyone knowing where I can get a legal copy of Windows XP against future need will get cake, by the way.)

Meanwhile, registration is easy. Just head over to FollowUpThen and sign up. Then you can email yourself a little reminder to thank me later.

The miracle of the finite goal

Cross it off!

There is something so extremely satisfying about crossing things off a check-list that I have one friend who adds already completed items to her list just so she can mark them off. (I wish I’d thought of that!)

Anyway, I am especially appreciative of this miracle today on this Miracle Monday because I have managed—more by luck, possibly, than good management—to wrestle my recent To Do lists into a level of such granularity as to make it possible for me to cross a number of things off.

One of the most interesting—to me—concepts in David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, is the idea that most To Do lists fail because they mix projects and tasks. According to Allen, you need separate lists.

Projects are things you can’t complete without taking multiple steps. “Buy new windows,” for example, cannot be crossed off your list unless you have already done the research, gotten the estimates, and made your decisions about type and style and when and where and so on.

“Call glass company for appointment,” however, is a thing you can do and cross off.

So, I try to keep a list of projects from which I try to pull out tasks in the smallest increments possible. Because then, I get to cross things off the list! Which, of course, is only the visible and supremely satisfying proof that the project has been advanced.

But, oh! How satisfying it is!

And how tangled things get when I forget that.

The item on the To Do list that sits there day after day, week after week, is almost always, upon closer investigation, a project. It doesn’t get done because it is not something a person can do.

Which is why I try to remember to take a step back whenever I am confronted by those lingering, uncrossed-off entries and realize that the actual task is to make a plan. Move it off the task list onto the project list. Break it down into the actual steps that need to be accomplished.

Those are the things that should be put on the To Do lists.

And today, I can celebrate moderate success at remembering that and the advancement—incremental though it may be—of several projects.

Yay!

270!

I win.

Not a presidential election, unfortunately. (Or fortunately! Who would want that job?)

I’m not talking about electoral college votes but consecutive days of blog posts. 270 consecutive days! Three-quarters of a year!

Cake!

I look back, and I wonder how I did it.

I look forward, and I wonder what comes next.

Today, however, I wonder will I make my quota?

One post in front of the other. That’s how it’s done. There are no shortcuts.

If your goal is 30 minutes of exercise a day, you can’t achieve it in 25 minutes.

It’s an interesting point. And something I will remember in future goal-setting endeavors. A goal based on churning out some regular quantity isn’t subject to streamlining. I mean, you can shave minutes off a distance goal. All you can do with a time goal is add distance to it. It still takes the same amount of time.

I foresee a review of my monster To Do List to see which projects are open to efficiency improvements and which just take the time they take. I suspect the latter would be good candidates for outsourcing. You know, if I had a staff—or the money to pay them.

I wonder how such a review would turn out. I think I’ve already gotten things down to where I’m as efficient as I can be—but maybe not. Maybe there are a few more hours for mumblety-peg.*

I also wonder if that really loud sighing noise my air compressor makes is okay, but that’s probably a whole other topic. It does seem to be working very hard on this cold, cold morning, though.

That’s one thing outsourced to technology, however.

I don’t have to cut firewood.

Instead, I can sit here in moderate warmth, plotting my 271st blog entry and wondering when the heater can take a rest.

* mumblety-peg = whatever you want to do. (It comes from Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth—a wonderful book about their family life with Frank B. Gilbreth, Sr., a pioneer of motion study. )

Someone once asked Dad: “But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?”

“For work, if you love that best,” said Dad. “For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure.” He looked over the top of his pince-nez. “For mumblety-peg, if that’s where your heart lies.”

Another way

Can you find one?

Sometimes, you win a race, because you are the only one who won’t quit. (Does The Tortoise and the Hare ring any bells?) Sheer dogged persistence can get you there, and the further you slog along, the less competition remains.

On the other hand, there is that famous Einstein quote in which insanity is defined as “doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.”

The tip for the day is keep going, but keep evaluating. Always ask yourself can you find another way?

If someone in your life is not giving you what you need, can you find another way to ask for it?

If you aren’t achieving your objective, can you find another way to go about pursuing it?

If I’m writing a computer program and it doesn’t work, I have to find another way or give up on whatever achievement it’s designed to accomplish.

Inevitably, there are times when I just don’t know enough. My latest javascript project comes to mind. I would really like to give it up. Just quit. But, I remember what Thomas Edison said while searching for the proper material to make a filament for a light bulb: I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

When the 10,000th way doesn’t work, it is really easy to become discouraged and frustrated. It’s very easy to fear another 10,000 unsuccessful attempts. But, Edison also said, Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in recorded history. And, yes, he is famous for never giving up. It may be more important, however, to realize that he didn’t just keep trying the same thing over and over. He tried different things.

So, yes, of course, keep going—and as you’re going, remember to ask yourself—Could there another way?

Symmetry

The key to beauty?

Our next guest, Jaclyn Smith, has frequently been named to various list of the most beautiful people of all time. “All time,” in this context, surely refers to “within the recorded history of photography.”

I read somewhere that it’s because she has a very symmetrical face. Most people’s faces show distinct differences between the left and right sides. Jaclyn Smith’s has very few—as does Denzel Washington’s. Hence, according to this thing I read somewhere, the “most beautiful” tag. Human beings perceive this symmetry as beauty.

I’m sure that’s not all of it. You could have a completely symmetrical countenance that was otherwise abhorrent to the human eye in some way. Nonetheless, Jaclyn Smith carries that title with all the baggage, good and bad, that goes with it.

She is most known as Kelly Garrett on Charlie’s Angels. That show, jiggle-factor aside, was important to women of my generation. I know it was controversial in the feminist realm because of the jiggle factor (they did seem to end up in bathing suits more often than most private detectives do) and because, at the end of the day, they still had a male boss, but it did give us images of women pushing the boundaries of traditionally female roles.

After her time as an Angel, Ms. Smith became a fixture on TV throughout the 80’s; during the 80’s and 90’s, she grew several successful businesses, pioneering the concept of celebrity-developed brands with her clothing line for Kmart. Now, in this decade, she has been seen on TV quite often in guest spots, as host of Shear Genius and a recurring role on The District.

I have a lot of respect for people who can take a role in a phenomenon and build on it. I respect the loyalty that kept her with the show throughout its entire run. I respect the ability to diversify, to take the opportunities that have been afforded and build businesses outside of show biz. And, let’s face it, a lot of us just have a soft spot for Kelly Garrett. She was the most thoroughly nice Angel, after all.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Category Archives: Productivity