

A Better To-Do List: The 1-3-5 Rule - acav
http://www.thedailymuse.com/career/the-1-3-5-rule/

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kriro
My current system is kind of strange but works for me:

\- I have a "master view" of sorts in Trello where I keep track of
projects/long term stuff in a birds eye view

\- I use a notebook (real one non electronic) to keep track of my daily stuff

\- In the notebook I write down the stuff todo every day and scribble down 25
minute checkboxes behind each one guestimating the time it takes (this is a
leftover from promodoro which I dropped alas I kept some parts that I liked)

\- Whenever I start on an item I highlight it with a yellow marker and cross
off a checkbox after about 25 minutes...if it takes longer i add extra
checkboxes as circles, triangles if it takes even longer (this is to keep
track of my self estimation)

\- Other than the date and todo items I have a box at the top for each day
where I track long term improvement stuff i.e. silly stuff like "got out of
bed within 15 minutes of the alarm ringing", "drank 1l+ of water"...I start
each day by drawing that box and after a while when those items become
automatic they get removed and replaced by other stuff (say "took a 10 minute
walk")

I could see adding a layer of 1-3-5 when creating the daily list but it might
actually be more like 1-2-3.

~~~
cpeterso
I used to write my tasks for the day on a single Post-It note. This limited
space forced me to make deliberate choices about which tasks were most
important. When I wrote longer lists in a big notebook, I rarely completed
every item. Over time, I determined that the Post-It note was just the right
size (depending on your handwriting). Plus I could stick my Post-It right on
my monitor, never out of sight.

Carrying leftover tasks over to tomorrow's list (sometimes for multiple days)
feels bad, whereas crumpling up (and recycling!) a completed Post-It note
feels great. :D

I also found a good use for those old business cards from a previous job or
title; they are just the right size for mini-task lists. :)

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jamesrcole
On the surface it sounds like an reasonable way to prioritize things -- every
day do 1 big thing, 3 medium things, and 5 small tasks -- but why should such
a division of your time necessarily reflect your priorities? What if the best
use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on the single most
important thing (for example)?

(Note, this is just from thinking it through in the abstract, and I know that
practical experience with things can show you sides of them that weren't
obvious in the abstract. So if anyone does have practical experience with it
and can comment, I'd be interested to hear it).

~~~
tripzilch
> What if the best use of your time at the present moment was to just focus on
> the single most important thing?

Well, you wouldn't need a to-do list, for starters.

~~~
jamesrcole
Just because it might be best to focus on just one thing _at the present_
doesn't mean you don't have other things to do that you need to keep track of.

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xjtian
I think the rigidity of this system is its biggest drawback, as is the case
with most productivity systems. For example, if I have two large projects that
I need to get done and I only write down one, the other is going to keep
nagging at me in the back of my head while I'm working and distract my focus.
If I write both of them down, then I've deviated from the system, which in my
experience means that by the end of the week, it'll just devolve into a
vanilla to-do list grouped by the 'size' of tasks.

That's mainly why I switched to GTD for all of my to-do lists and projects.
Because my inbox holds literally every task or to-do item that pops into my
head during the day, I never have that distracting "am I forgetting
something?" feeling during the day. I can process and sort my inbox whenever I
have free time, and the flexibility in deciding which tasks should be made
into projects, next actions, etc... means that the system always fits my
schedule no matter how unpredictable or crazy it is, instead of me having to
fit my schedule into the system.

~~~
vidarh
If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of
your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide
one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is
that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two
minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks.
Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to
push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up
revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really
know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a
task...

~~~
xjtian
Sometimes it's not so straightforward to split up large into many small tasks.
A lot of the time these steps will depend on other unpredictable factors,
which leads to a lot of backtracking and adjusting my to-do list down the road
when I should be working.

I'm a fan of iteratively processing my projects, deciding just the next one or
two steps every time I process my tasks. I find that if I let my to-do lists
balloon in size, I have less motivation to actually clear it out. But that's
just me. In the end it's all about making the right decision based on how you
know your brain works.

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donutdan4114
Inspired me to make <http://1-3-5.com/>

~~~
sgoody
Kudos to you!

I can see that this is really really simple stuff (single page client side
only), but it's genuinely executed very well in terms of appearance, usability
and functionality.

I think we could all learn a little something from this.

~~~
donutdan4114
Thanks! I was also inspired from this: <http://a5.gg/> Sort of the same idea;
simple, elegant.. 1-3-5.com is just a GitHub page ;)

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sgoody
I know there's a lot of this kind of advise out there and I find most of it
works fairly well. I think that for people who have a problem getting things
done, the main issue is just not having any way of tracking things at all.

I don't follow any methodology as such, but one thing which did help me was
reading a tiny bit about the Pomodoro stuff. Basically the thing which
absolutely kills my productivity is context switching. i.e. starting one
thing, then breaking off to do another. What I take away from the Pomodoro
stuff is that I should not work on anything for less than 20mins and that time
should be carved up into 20min chunks.

In practice all this means to me is that I try not to get distracted by other
things and if somebody attempts to get my attention I'll get them to wait
until I've completed the thing which I'm at task on.

I don't do anything by strict structure, so everything's subject to changes,
but I try to be careful to allocate a minimum amount of time to things and I
_try_ to make a todo list. In my private life I use toodledo, which gives me
decent views by due date/urgency/context/folder. At work, I'm using a mix of
Gmail stars, Gmail tasks and proprietary apps, though in the past I have just
used a single .txt file.

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d0m
Only thing I've found that worked for me was emails. Whatever app I want to
use, I'll still get 100+ emails everyday. When I don't have that much thing to
do, cool todo apps are great.. but anytime there's a real "get shit done
urgently" I just fall back to email mode.. so I guessed why not always use
email.

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jkaljundi
Even doing just 1 big thing per day can do miracles:
<http://blog.weekdone.com/top-10-ways-for-a-productive-week/>

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ianox
This reminds me of a blog post by Scott Hanselman where he mentioned the Rule
of Three [2], which seems like a similar approach to todo lists in that it
helps you narrow your focus onto the most important things you need to get
done.

[1]
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoat...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ProductivityVsGuiltAndSelfLoathing.aspx)

[2] <http://sourcesofinsight.com/the-rule-of-3/>

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pjungwir
This approach also lets you move the big thing (or hard thing) to a time when
you are at your best and have few interruptions. I personally like to do the
hard or more unknown bits sooner, and sometimes I even save up the easy stuff
for those after-lunch hours when my brain feels mushier.

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nshankar
I use a diary to maintain the tasks for any day. If the tasks are not done on
that day, very rarely they are done in a single day, I write them on the next
day's calendar page. I also write a small note below the previous page where I
get the next thread.

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Brajeshwar
Try this App EisenPower - <http://www.eisenpowerapp.com/>

Nope, I've nothing to do with the app. I'm just a happy regular user.

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Y0L0
This is similar to A-B-C analysis:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#ABC_analysis>

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antimora
this is similar to these suggestions from the following articles

1\. [http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity-
acc...](http://mysuperchargedlife.com/blog/personal-productivity-
accomplish-3-things-today/)

2\. [http://lifehacker.com/5853732/take-a-more-realistic-
approach...](http://lifehacker.com/5853732/take-a-more-realistic-approach-to-
your-to+do-list-with-the-3-%252B-2-rule)

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danlopez
I like what this allows for daily tracking. It makes it really easy to see if
you got through everything you wanted to on a daily basis.

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shadowrunner
Not a bad idea, but I don't print the templates out. Just use a scrap piece of
paper. It'll save money and trees.

