Thanks everyone for being so supportive as I took a few months off to grapple with some big stuff. The blog is back and the podcast will restart in September.

You might notice some changes:

• I have a new store, where you can purchase most of the items I had for sale before: the Chore Grid and the Taming the Gmail Dragon
• I’ve launched a printable planner business, starting with a craft planner for Kumihimo, the art of Japanese braiding
• I’ve launched print-on-demand planners through Amazon
• I’m in the process of switching my email provider, to provide better service to you all (and way less frustration on my end!)
• I’ve gotten off social media. (More on that tomorrow).

There are probably other things that I have forgotten about, but they will all work themselves out.

I’m glad to be back!

Some of us are sighing in relief now that December’s busyness has passed. However, busy times can come at any point in your year. Today’s episode talks about how to get through the busy times.

Support me at Patreon: You can find all the episodes over at Patreon.

I had a question come to me this past week about managing the holidays. 

All I know is that until I wrote my holiday task helper, I would consistently forget to do things.

Things like taking the turkey out of the freezer in time to thaw. Believe me, it is no fun trying to thaw a frozen turkey with hot water and hair dryers.

Things like stocking stuffers. Or gifts. Or a multitude of other things.

Add to that we celebrate everything: Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Yule, Christmas…and all the tasks multiply. 

So I made this product out of desperation to keep me on track.

My holiday task helper, available in Excel and Google format, allows you to set up your own holidays and tasks and get a list of when everything is due.

Are you interested in getting it together this year? Get more information about the Holiday Task Helper. Only $5.99 for not missing any deadlines.

Isn’t not having to thaw a turkey with a hair dryer worth the price of a coffee?

One of the weak spots of the Getting Things Done process is that it doesn’t deal well with household and family type items. This article is the second in a series to show how you can create a system for Getting Household Things Done.

One of the big foci of Getting Things Done is handling the inputs that come into the system in such a way that you get them out of your head and into a trusted system. Once they are in the trusted system, they will be served up to you at a time and place that you can deal with them.

The Types of Inputs

In the first article in this series, we talked about the two types of projects that make up the household system. These follow two paths, straight-line, and circular/repetitive. The inputs allow you to determine which type of project it is.

• Straight-path items. Straight-path items are the typical projects that are seen when exploring the Getting Things Done universe. These items have a well-defined start, a path through, and a definitive end. These straight-path items include items that only take one step, as well as those that require multiple steps to completions (also known as projects). Examples of straight-path items at home include reading a library book, sending back a permission slip, repainting a room and buying school supplies from the teacher’s list.
• Circular (repetitive) items. Circular or repetitive items are those that repeat with no other trigger than the passage of time. It is not the item itself that makes it different, but rather that it should be done on a recurring bases. Each circular item for a given date, like its repetitive cousin, has a path through and a definitive end. But the danger for the circular items is that they stay in the head because of the repetition. Examples of circular items at home include weekly laundry, dusting, changing out air filters and draining the water heater.

Processing Straight Path Items

Straight-path items will come into your home in a variety of channels, such as the mailbox, telephone and children. All things should be collected and put into a physical space that gets processed regularly.

Each item should be dealt with once; you should not pick up an item and put it back in the box. Remember that procrastination is simply decisions that haven’t been made.

If you have school-aged children in the house, you will probably need to process this box 2 or 3 times weekly to be able to catch anything urgent that comes home from the school.

For each item, either take care of it right away if it requires less than two minutes, or enter it into your trusted system.

Permission slips would be signed and put back into the schoolbag. Bills would be paid. Circulars perused and tossed. The library book you just picked up entered into your system. So on and so forth.

There is a lot of information about processing these types of projects in Getting Things Done, so I won’t go into further detail here.

Processing Circular Items

The difficult thing about getting the circular items into the trusted system is that there is no specific trigger. No one is going to send you a postcard reminding you to clean your bathtub. Yet to go until you notice that the bathtub needs cleaning just turns a simple job into an hour-long ordeal.

In order to capture these circular items, we can’t rely on an external trigger. We have to be able to seek them out and set them up.

Luckily, this is where patterns come in.

If you are indoors, look around you at the room you are in (even if you are not at home). All rooms have certain features in common. Every room has a floor, a ceiling and walls. You have a way to enter the room.

Now look at the furniture in the room. Pretty much all furniture has horizontal and vertical surfaces.

Once you have seen the pattern you can make a list of the circular items that will need to be attended to.

Moving Through the House

Take a piece of paper and turn it sideways. Down the side of the paper you will write the features of the room. Across the top you will write the room. And any room that has that feature will get an X where the two meet.

Start at the front door of your house and move clockwise, cataloging the space. Write down the features: walls, floors, rugs, ceiling, windows, window treatments, door/ways, baseboards, heating elements, light switches, outlets, lights/lamps. Write down some generic furniture terms: tops/shelves/drawers (horizontal) and sides (vertical). Write down any appliances or machines you see. Note special items like pianos (tuning) and fireplaces (cleaning). Some rooms will have plumbing; write this down.

Moving Outside

Next you will do the same things for the outside of your house. Even if you are not responsible for the maintenance, it is good to keep an eye on things so that a blocked gutter doesn’t damage the things inside the house.

While the outside won’t have as many common features as the inside, you can catalog by space. You can look at the items. If you have done the inside of the house, you will see all the features on the outside as well.

Putting Circular Items into a Trusted System

Next we have to put the circular repetitive items into the trusted system. You will need to have one that allows you to repeat. Most modern task managers will do this, but even a circular card file will work as long as you remember to move the card to the next time it needs to be done.

You will have a repeating task for every X on your paper. The key with translating the grid you created on your walkthrough is to determine how often a single task needs to be done. Some will need to be done weekly (like cleaning out the refrigerator or cleaning the bathroom), while some will be done yearly (like tuning a piano or cleaning the fireplace). Some items won’t need to be cleaned as often as those with heavier usage: a main bath will need to be cleaned more frequently than a guest bath that is hardly even used.

Don’t make all of the tasks due this week and then start the repetition. Spread the start times out so that your work is spread out and balanced.

(If you want to have an easy way to do this, you can look at my Chore Grid. It allows you to do the grid in a spreadsheet, and then you can look at the balance of the tasks over a full year. From there it is easy to figure out how to set up the repeats)

That’s So Much Work!

I have heard from many people that this is too much work. However, if the tasks are not in a trusted system, you are going to rely on you noticing that a task needs to be done in order to trigger the action.

When do these triggers happen? Generally when someone is about to pay a visit. And I have observed that if you wait until someone visits to do this cleaning, you will spend too long and expend too much energy to get the place back in good condition.

Putting these tasks into the trusted system means they will be served up when you decided they needed to be done, rather than waiting for the external trigger.

The Other Advantage: Not Having A Task Master

The other advantage to getting these household tasks into a single system is that everyone can go and see what needs to be done…and do it.

Usually the mom is in charge of handing out chores. Instead, we can remove the Task Master from the picture and have all the people who live in the house contribute to its upkeep. The excuse of “I don’t know what has to be done” is gone.

By seeking out the inputs for the Getting Household Things Done instead of relying on your memory or observation, you will not have to think about household things. Everything will be in a trusted system and handled.

Today we’ve talked about the dangers of overplanning and how it ties into traditional project planning. Agile planning is a better way and we talk about how to do this.

Support me at Patreon: You can find all the episodes over at Patreon.

When I made the decision to move away from Evernote I knew I had to find a new home for my information. After a lot of searching and trial and error, I settled on OneNote and Trello. However, I was facing a major pile of pain in moving the information over. There was nothing on the web that told me how to do this. So I cobbled together a solution. Today’s article is about this solution.

Built In Tools Don’t Work For OneNote

OneNote has a tool that supposedly moves data from Evernote to OneNote. It doesn’t work. I suspect the recent changes at Evernote have broken it, but Microsoft isn’t supporting the tool anymore.

I certainly didn’t want to copy and paste everything. It would take weeks.

There Is No Built-In Evernote To Trello Tool

And going to Trello? There was nothing.

Enter Automation

It was chance that I got an email from IFTTT about this time. And I realized that I could use automation tools to move the data from Evernote to its new home.

IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) is an automation tool I have used for years. I use it to text me when a new article goes live on the blog (so that I know it has happened), turn on the lights when I come home, add Feedly articles to Instapaper, get a digest of the daily news mailed to me, get a weather report at 6 am, and to add a “go to bed at 9” task when I had a short night.

But IFTTT connects to Evernote. It also connects to Trello and OneNote. IFTTT is free if you use their recipes, but if you want to create more than 3 recipes of your own, you need to pay. Having already used my free recipes, I decided to pay for a month of IFTTT so I could complete this port.

Trello First

I decided to tackle Trello first, because some of my someday/maybe projects had information that I thought needed to remain in OneNote. I set up a recipe that if a new tag of “Trello” was added to an Evernote note, it would create a new card in Trello.

Then I searched all my someday/maybe and active projects, set the tag, and sat back.

About a tenth went over. It seems that it did the first ten and then Evernote said, “nope”. At least that was according to the logs in IFTTT.

So I untagged all those notes in Evernote, and started sending over my projects, five records at a time. That way I could monitor Trello, adjust the tasks as necessary, and make sure everything went.

I was able to port everything over to Trello using this slow method. If the note in Evernote was just the task (and not a pattern or instructions) I deleted the note.

OneNote Next

Next I wanted to do OneNote. However, IFTTT was even more spotty at this point. I was dropping information out even when I was sending five notes at once. It seemed to choke on anything that had a picture, formatting or HTML.

Zapier to the Rescue.

I’ve known about the other automation tool out there for a long time. But its price point put me off, and honestly, IFTTT did everything I needed. But I wanted to give it a try for the Great Evernote Escape. I figured paying $30 was worth not having to copy and paste everything by hand.

I signed up for Zapier, and they gave me a free two week trial of their upgraded plan. It was enough to bring everything over, if it worked.

Zapier seemed to play nicer with Evernote, but Evernote still choked. So I set up my recipe in Zapier, and then went notebook by notebook, pushing notes from Evernote over in groups of 10. Those that didn’t make it I left alone, and deleted the ones that had transferred from Evernote.

After four evenings, I had everything I could in OneNote that would automatically go. There were about 200 notes left.

Copy and Paste

I started doing a copy and paste from Evernote, but I found that if I opened the website up from Evernote and clipped using the OneNote clipper I had much nicer looking notes. So I did that.

For those websites and articles that no longer existed, I copied and pasted from Evernote. This was about 25 notes.

Results

In the end, I had everything moved from Evernote over. I restored everything from trash in Evernote in case I need to use it, but so far I haven’t had to.

I am very glad to be free of Evernote and over in systems that actually work. I hope that my experience in what I had to do to move the data is helpful to others who are trying to escape from Evernote as well.

Every now and then I take a long look at my to do list and I realize that drastic action is called for if I am gong to significantly cut it down. I schedule a “clear the deck” day.

I never thought this would be a useful method for anyone, because honestly, how many people get that behind on their tasks? Apparently, a lot of us.

Clearing the Deck

This method simply means that I double-down on my task list and hit those things that have been lingering out there.

It may be a bunch of office tasks. It may be household things. It may even be outside – one clearing involved turning over a garden bed, mowing the lawn and weeding.

These are the tasks that we never seem to get to, either because of time constraints or interest level. Yet getting them off the list is amazingly freeing.

When To Schedule A Clearing

I know I need a clear the deck day when I have more than 5 tasks that have been sitting on my lists for more than 2 weeks.

I can also schedule one if I have more than 10 tasks that are sliding from day to day throughout a week.

Either way, this is meant to be an anti-procrastination tool, so it comes about when I see the need.

What I Do to Have a “Clear The Deck” Day

Usually I schedule a half day at work and knock the rest of the tasks out, but sometimes I will do this on a weekend. It doesn’t matter when you schedule, but it does matter that you have an unbroken stretch of time, like three to four hours.

From there it’s just a matter of setting things up properly.

Minimize Distractions

For me, the most important part of clearing the deck is to have no distractions. This means I tell husband and daughter that I’m busy and not to interrupt me. Interruptions from the fur-beasts have to be minimized.

Interruptions of this kind lead me off the path of what I want to do most willingly; for after all, isn’t playing a game with your child more important than doing something that has been on the list for months? Important, yes, but at the same time, it doesn’t lead toward the goal.

Classify The Where

Next I split my tasks by where they need to be done. I use my Productivity Sprint method and list all my tasks. Then I classify them by where they need to be done. I try to group things so that I don’t end up moving randomly around the house, but rather take care of the tasks in one area before moving on to the next.

Stick To The List

Distraction is the enemy of clearing the decks. I have a list, made during the last step, and I know what needs to be done where. By having the tasks written out, I can focus on what needs to be done in the area in which I find myself.

Put on Peppy Music

Peppy music, regardless of the type, will get me working faster. I type faster, think faster, and move faster.

I love the wireless earbuds I received this winter because I can put my phone down and still listen without disturbing anyone else.

Time everything

I work with a timer on me. I do 15 minutes on one task, and when the timer goes off, I switch to another. I keep this up during the clear, taking one 15 minutes every two hours just to do something fun. The key is that when the timer goes off, I have to move on. If I don’t, I derail myself and my energy flow. If I finish my task before the timer goes off (which happens more often than not), I simply move on.

I Give Myself Rewards

At the beginning of the clear, I plan my reward for the work. It can be something I want to buy, or even just watching a favorite movie. Every two hours, I also get to do something fun. This keeps me motivated and working.

I find that clear-the-deck days are not as frequent as they once were. However, I still need to do them in order to keep myself on top of my lists.

Book Information

Title: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time (BK Life)* (aff)
Author: Brian Tracy
Rating (of 10): 7
ISBN: 978-1576754221

Book Summary

Eat That Frog! is a book with 21 ways to get over procrastination and into results.

Review

I loved the first part of the book: the introduction gave the three frog sayings that inspired the book’s title:

1. If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.
2. If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest first.
3. If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.

I adore these sayings. They are to the point, and unusual enough to stick with me. It really does boil down the way to get things done.

When I first read and reviewed this book, it was already dated. First published in 2001, it was on the cusp of the personal productivity movement along with Covey and Allen. And it reflects the times. This time I read the 2017 edition, which had a nice intro tacked on.

So the thing with old productivity books, especially from those right around the century mark, is that technology has changed the landscape so much that most of the books are not fully relevant anymore. That being said, there is still a lot of wisdom to be found in this book.

Advice to put your time and energy into high-value activities that move you toward your goals is first and foremost. These are big ugly frogs that should be eaten first. But in order to do that, you have to distinguish these from the army of not-so-ugly frogs that surround them.

I like the way this book breaks things down into small digestible chunks (not frogs) which are more accessible than some of the other books out there.

Do I agree with the 21 items? Not completely. As a software engineer, and a former project management, I know that the method Tracy uses, of mapping an entire goal out before you begin, doesn’t work well. Using the ABCDE method doesn’t necessarily work when you’re drinking from a firehose. But other things are good to remember: plan your day; apply the 80/20 rule; focus on what is in front of you.

There was one piece that struck me soundly. The chapter on constraints points out that most of what holds us back is in ourselves. If that is true, then this is where the efforts need to be made to remove the sticking points. This is something I will be thinking about in the next few weeks.

All in all, I think this is a book worth reading, both for those new to the productivity sphere, and for those who have been there a while. There is no denying that Tracy’s success is real, and these are the “secrets” he has shared to help us along the road.

Sometimes I feel that when I declutter my information intake, I get stuck in a bubble of my own making. But in order to keep growing, I need additional inputs. So the 30 day challenge for this month is to search out a new website each day.

Why New Websites?

I don’t want to be stuck. Additional sources of information – even if I might not agree with them – are important for me to maintain a balanced outlook. I need the challenges to my thought patterns in order to be able to grow. But I don’t consciously seek out these new sources, and that can lead to confirmation bias.

Most of the time I stumble onto websites by accident. I may hear something on a podcast (and then scramble to remember what it is because I can’t write it down and Siri is less than helpful in this case). I may read about it in a book, or hear it by chance. But there are a lot of websites and blogs out there that may not get the press because they aren’t producing books or guest posting (pointing the finger back at me in this case).

I wanted to be more deliberate in searching out what I am reading, and adding it to my reading list if I feel it is an ongoing source of good information. But this also has to be focused. I don’t want to lose hours to this challenge task.

Rules

I have a couple of rules for this task.

1. Theme-focused. Sunday: writing; Monday: productivity; Tuesday: organization; Wednesday: coding; Thursday: intentional living; Friday: simplification; Saturday: crafts. I am doing this to expand my horizons in all areas of my life, not just the ones that I write about in the blog. This is a whole-life challenge.
2. Must read at least 5 articles. If the articles are worthwhile, I will add the website to my Feedly. I know how easy it is to add to my blog reader (which is how I manage all of my reading in once place). But I have to make sure the website is worth adding. For all the great content out there, there is still a lot of fluffy content that is not worth my time.

What I Hope to Gain

I hope to expand my horizons. I want more quality information in my life. And I want to do it in a deliberate fashion, not leaving it to chance mention.

Conclusion

I may not like any of the websites I stumble across, or I may like a handful that will then get added to my weekly consumption. But at least I will be experimenting with trying. I do not see this as a long-term habit, just something to try for 30 days.

For the first month of 2020, I chose the challenge of gratitude. I wanted to have more gratitude in my life in order to recognize how blessed I am, and to counteract the idea of “more” that is everywhere these days.

What I Found

It was hard for me to remember to do this every day. I had to set a reminder on my phone to tell me to turn to the page in my journal to work on this. I think that this would have been easier to do online.

I also struggled with ideas for what to be grateful for. I found that if I had a theme (like “home” or “family”) it was easier to find things to be grateful for.

This was not my most successful challenge. It was probably done 30% of the time. If I choose to do this again, I will do it online, use reminders, and use themes to help me with this.