Yes, of course, almost all of us have been there. This is where something like Trello is useful. I usually just jot things down as soon as I remember something, or as soon as some 'trigger' occur (e.g. an email request, a mail reminder, etc). Then I'll worry about prioritizing later. But it is important to make some time, e.g. 5 minutes every other day, whatever, to look at the list and prioritize.madbrain wrote:Partly it's lack of urgency for some of them, but also simply information overload - far too many tasks to remember them all, and some just fall off when my personal RAM overflows.armeliusc wrote:First of all, you'd need to simplify your requirements. Technically all of those are doable / has been done in many different software, but priorities, due dates, etc would not work if you don't follow them. You will eventually ignore the email reminders, etc.
Second: prioritize. Have a list for things that must be done, and things that you would like to do, analogous to the "need vs want" in personal finance. Otherwise the task list becomes useless pretty quick. Presumably you're skipping to do some tasks because you don't feel it's urgent enough to do them.
Also the nice thing about Trello is it lets you add descriptions, attachment, comments, to the list.
Right, for something that's long range (e.g. few months or longer in the future), I use calendar as a trigger. So my Trello cards only contains relatively recent / urgent things need to get done. For example, once I get my passport, I put an event on my Google calendar on a Monday about 2 months before the expiration date to start thinking about renewing. Once this event pops up, I put it on Trello as something I need to do relatively soon.madbrain wrote: Some tasks may be important but not actually urgent time-wise, and it's easy to forget/skip those, and suffer the consequences later (or much later).
Kanban concept is relatively simple: basically there are three states available for any task: To Do, Doing (in Progress), Done. Put new things in To do and prioritize. When doing them, put it in "In Progress". Another major thing is that, limit the number of things in progress. 3 is a good number. This is so that you avoid too much of task / context switching.
In my case I added another state: "Blocked Elsewhere". This is for a task that require someone else to do something before I can continue; e.g. paper being reviewed, waiting approval, etc. It stays in that state until a trigger occur, then I'd move it back to "In Progress", This is why the comments / activiy log in Trello is nice, you can keep things there to remind yourself where things are, put sub-tasks, etc.
