Way back when I started working, I tended to get overwhelmed by all the myriad things coming my way. I still sometimes do. I found a few valuable lessons in „Getting Things Done“
to do lists → what you have written down is out of your brain and you don‘t need to keep track of it anymore
categorize tasks into „I am waiting for something“, „I have to do something“, „it is a 5 minute task“ and some others…
splitting larger tasks into smaller more doable ones. Like when a task seems too big for me to solve, i try a first step like writing down the phone number I need to call.
The old quadrant of „dringend vs wichtig“ (time critical vs important) and then sort everything by those two boolean flags into quadrants and do the time critical and important ones first…
I use all these to this day.
I find todo lists immensely useful but I only use them when things get overwhelming.
As tools I use a mixture of „Todoist“and a (these days digital) notebook (paper is fine).
Also pragmatism vs perfectionism. One need to learn when to prioritize which of these. Mostly the former as per the 80% rule: mostly 80% of something is enough. The final 20% take far more time than the 80% and are not always worth investing time in.
I struggle with accepting that what people produce isn’t what I would produce or how I would tackle the problem. Getting slowly better at burying the my approach is better view when it comes to delegating,
Though “huge rotting to-do list” is definitely a problem, and one I suffer from myself. I use emacs org-mode and have written various ancillary software to allow automatic addition of tasks, deadline reminders, etc.
I haven’t internalised the details of the “SMART” principles but I try to make to-do list items:
unambiguous about whether they’ve been achieved or not
single tasks
small tasks
something I can start immediately, not depending on anything else
So rather than a huge “clear up the machine room” item it would be a series of smaller ones like “sort all contents of box A in machine room”.
My wife gave our daughter’s school some money for a fundraiser. There was a raffle. We won a prize. Milkshakes with the principals. I am an adult, and I’m sure that’s not really a prize. My daughter is horrified.
The employment saga continues! The girl we were employing in mid Feb (it was supposed to be end of Jan, but there was some back and forwards) has re-negotiated with her employer and is not joining us. So we are on DEFCON 3 in my team…
By the 20th of February our usual team of 4 (that was understaffed already) will be a team of 2. Great.
Over the past few days, I have been trying to rearrange our garage to move another bookshelf over to hold my overflowing stacks of games. Today, in the process of doing that, I had to move said stacks of games, and unload my Kallax, which was moving aside.
Here’s everything I moved. This does not include the games I have on the other bookshelf that was already in place, nor the handful I have in our hallway closet.
Sigh. Yesterday our older kid was running at school (whether eloping or just running, we still aren’t certain) and tripped and broke one of his front teeth. It snapped off and left the root inside, so it can’t be fixed. Luckily he has a sedated dentist appointment early next month, where they will remove the root, but they’ve said they have to wait until he is mostly grown before they can really do anything with it. So, for the rest of his childhood, he’s going to be missing a tooth, and it just sucks!
At least it isn’t a permanent one, I guess? My daughter’s best friend knocked his upper 4 front teeth about two-three months ago, but they were already wobbly (he’s 6, so they were about to be ready) so now his permanent teeth are starting to show up. How old is he?
I wore braces to correct teeth for aaaages then as soon as I was told I could take the braces off, someone accidentally knocked them out with a tennis racket and two teeth had to be rebuilt anyway!
@Chewy77 Sadly it is a permanent front tooth. From what the dentist said, they have to let him finish growing. He’s 11. The dentist was really nice. They called us to come in sooner to give the best chance. But the tooth was broken in a bad place.
Even said they would make a false tooth piece if we wanted to try, at cost.
It’s kind of ironic since last year around this time is one his little brother broke half his front tooth. That was permanent but they were able to fix it.
Spent this morning writing HARD emails. I am emotionally wrecked.
