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Easy to confuse

The per­son who mix­es up ​“to store” and ​“to do” makes life hard for him- or her­self. I some­times see this hap­pen­ing in tools used to keep track of all the things we need to do — either on col­lab­o­ra­tive sur­faces or on our very own to-do lists.

It can be tools such as a dig­i­tal to-do list in Todoist or ToDo or it can be in a col­lab­o­ra­tive tool such as Plan­ner or Trello.

It just happens

A cou­ple of peo­ple decide to do some­thing togeth­er and choose a col­lab­o­ra­tive tool to keep track of all the things they need to do. They cre­ate cards or tasks from all the activ­i­ties, group them accord­ing to themes, and assign tasks to every­one involved in the project. They there­by ensure they have a great overview of what is left to do — such a good overview, in fact, that the tool slow­ly becomes a place where they ​“keep track of everything”.

Pret­ty soon some­one rea­sons that it would also be great to be able to quick­ly and eas­i­ly find the doc­u­ment you need when work­ing on a cer­tain cur­rent­ly impor­tant theme or task. The per­son adds a new card to which they attach the doc­u­ment with the inten­tion of mak­ing it eas­i­ly acces­si­ble. And thus begins the dete­ri­o­ra­tion, the down­hill lead­ing to a com­plete mess, away from the great overview and excel­lent structure.

The num­ber of cards with mate­ri­als attached to them (which in all hon­esty are ​“storage”-cards rather than ​“to do”-cards) increase (“since it is so prac­ti­cal to keep it all in one place”) and it keeps get­ting hard­er and hard­er to see which cards con­tain to-do tasks and which are just hold­ers of rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. The overview no longer con­tains what is still left to do, but a lit­tle bit of every­thing. What a mess.

Do this

If you want to avoid the par­tic­u­lar mess cre­at­ed when mix­ing ​“to store” with ​“to do”, take a hard look at the place or tool which you turn to for a com­plete overview of every­thing you (either your­self or you as a group) have left to do, and see if you can find some­thing that is not a to-do task but was placed there for easy ref­er­ence — meant to stay indefinitely.

If you find infor­ma­tion or doc­u­ments that are pas­sive, mean­ing things that are some­thing else than to-do tasks, in the overview, move them to the place where you store infor­ma­tion and doc­u­ments you want eas­i­ly avail­able when need­ed, but off the to-do list. You can remove the card com­plete­ly if it only con­tains links to doc­u­ments placed elsewhere.

Well done! You have now cleaned up your ​“to do”-overview and are back on track in terms of your struc­ture. The overview will become much eas­i­er to deci­pher from now on, I promise.

Less admin, more done

If you keep things from the cat­e­gories ​“to store and save” and ​“to do” in sep­a­rate loca­tions, you will actu­al­ly find your mate­ri­als faster and keep track of what you need to get done eas­i­er. Less look­ing for things, few­er wrong clicks, and less time wast­ed. You will get more done in the end, and spend less time sim­ply mov­ing things around or admin­is­trat­ing notes. Sounds great, don’t you think?

What’s your way?

If you are being hon­est, is your overview also a jum­bled mess of both ref­er­ence mate­ri­als and tasks? If this used to be the case but is no longer so, how did you solve the prob­lem? Please write and share how you man­aged to sort this par­tic­u­lar mess out. 

(Speak­ing of dif­fer­ent tools and keep­ing them orga­nized. Feel free to also read my post ​“Decide what tool you will use for what pur­pose”)