Your time is valuable. Probably the most valuable thing you possess. It should carry more weight than spending money. Yet we never seem to value it like that. We work for free time. We work smarter to create free time.
I, like many people have a memory like a sieve. This is down to interruptions. I won’t go into why interruptions are so bad in the workplace but we’ve all gone through this scenario. Your working on a project, your full attention is 100% focused on what you are doing. Then someone taps you on the shoulder with a “Hey Brian, ….”. These can be urgent taps on the shoulder, but more often that not they aren’t.
These interruptions can also be to ask for something to be done. The problem is the minute that person has left your desk, so too has that task. All you want to do is get 100% back focused on that problem you were solving or the project you were working on. You simply file it under “I’ll stick that in the calender later” in your memory. Gone for ever.
I’ve had this problem for years. People call it having a bad memory, I would say it’s that your just not ready to give your attention to that person as you weren’t exactly planning on their interruption.
So I decided to have a look around for a solution to this problem and I found a mac application call Things from Cultured Code.
Cultured Code: Things
Things for Mac by Cultured Code
Things is what I would describe as a simple task management app that works for my type of problem. When that someone knocks on my shoulder, I would like to deal with it as polietely as possible but also to remember what they needed me to do.
If you hit Ctrl + Enter, you get a dialogue, that sits on top of all your other applications where you can quickly type in what they wanted in about 5 to 10 works and just hit enter. Thats it, nothing more.
An hour later when you’ve got some free time, you fire up the Things application fully. Where your greeted with one of the cleanest UI’s I’ve ever played with. You select your “Inbox” and there lies all of your Tasks that you’ve been entering over the hours.
Now you can manage them as you’ve got your free time. You can set when you have time to get these Things done. Schedule them for a later date. Assign them to a project or if they are just on the back burner fire them in the “Someday” folder.
There’s plenty of more features to this product which you can check out on their site or even better take a trial of the software for 30 days. I wanted to highlight how a clean piece of software can declutter your day, allow you to be less interrupted and back on that problem you wanted to solve.
Nice article. I’d heard good things about the iPhone/iPad versions of Things (I use Evernote, so I’d need a good reason to switch), but a free trial of the desktop version, you say? Sold.
Yea, I started by downloading the free trial. It turned into one of those things where you download it, install it but forget to use it within the 30 days.
I emailed the guys at CC and said what had happened. They actually took the time to write into future releases that if you require an extension on your trial they can extend it very easily for a further 1/2 month.
Pretty cool that they listen to their users to well.
[...] I assign myself. I keep tabs on what tasks need to be done using a task manager called Things. You can read more about it’s benefits here. If I’m working on one of my tasks, the time assigned to it is never totally accurate. Some [...]