The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ““Done!”” pod­cast:

Give your­self a shortcut

Instead of sav­ing all the infor­ma­tion you might need in the rel­e­vant task on the list, you can link to any­thing you need to do in the note box. This could, for instance, be:

• the notes from the meet­ing where the task ​“came up” and you were put in charge of it
• a doc­u­ment with a stan­dard text you will use when send­ing some­thing as part of the task
• a hand­ful of images you will use dur­ing the exe­cu­tion of the task
• a guide describ­ing how to do what you are going to do

If the task is recur­ring, you can ​“load it” with every­thing you need every time you do it (every month, for exam­ple). Then it will feel like sit­ting down at a set table when the time comes to do the task again. Every­thing is pre­pared. You can get straight to work.

Try this

If you could use adding links to addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion in your to-do tasks more than you do today, take a moment to inves­ti­gate what pos­si­bil­i­ties you have in the tool you use.

For exam­ple, if you work in Office 365, you can copy a link to a sheet in OneNote (which you then paste into the note for a task in Microsoft To-Do or Out­look Tasks) and to a doc­u­ment in OneDrive.

In both Microsoft To-Do and Out­look Tasks, you can attach a doc­u­ment. Still, I rec­om­mend that you link to it instead so that you do not unknow­ing­ly cre­ate mul­ti­ple ver­sions of the same doc­u­ment in dif­fer­ent places, which can eas­i­ly con­fuse you regard­ing which ver­sion is the cur­rent one.

If you use Things, like me, a link to a doc­u­ment is auto­mat­i­cal­ly past­ed when you ​“drag” it to a task and drop it there.

More time becomes available

The more you link to the infor­ma­tion you need to com­plete a task, the eas­i­er it is to get the task done. You will not have to waste time look­ing for things you knew exact­ly where they were ear­li­er. Every­thing you need is just a click away, and eas­i­ly acces­si­ble. Could it be better?

How do you do it?

What infor­ma­tion do you link to in your tasks to make your work eas­i­er? Please write and tell me!

(Do you have lots of dig­i­tal doc­u­ments scat­tered around? Then I rec­om­mend mak­ing a map for them!)