Peace of Mind Organizing

Dealing with task-management overwhelm

10 September 2021

I have a terrific Trello daily task management board that I’ve been using for 15 months with great success. It’s especially good at helping me complete important daily tasks. I’ve been supplementing it with a hand-written/hand-lettered task list most days that helps me practice my hand lettering and keep my tasks top of mind (plus it’s pretty to look at, which is nice.) My co-host, Shannon Wilkinson, and I talked about my hand-lettered task list a little in this week’s episode of our podcast Getting to Good Enough.

I don’t usually have a problem staying on top of my tasks and prioritizing them. Ordinarily I plow through a lot of tasks in a day and I’m generally pleased with my productivity. But right now, at this moment, I’m overwhelmed by projects and keeping track of all the tasks they entail. I feel out of control and that feeling alone is distracting. My productivity and peace of mind are suffering!

On top of my normal activities of client consults and administration, blogging and podcasting, I have these things going on:

• I hired a new employee, Adrienne Pittson (I’ll introduce her to you next week!);
• I have a leadership role in a community service project;
• I’m researching a new car to buy (I’m thinking of going electric!);
• I’m working with Molly Winters, a wonderful marketing consultant and copywriter, on a campaign targeted at new and aspiring organizers (if that piques your curiosity, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the mailing list I’ll be building);
• I’m planning a trip to Walla Walla next month.

So today I created a new board in Trello called Projects – Fall 2021. Here’s what I did:

• I created a list for each project as well as a list called Empty the Brain.
• In the Empty the Brain list, I added a card for each task I could think of, regardless of what project it was associated with.
• I created a colored label for each project and marked each card with the appropriate label.
• I moved each labeled card to the appropriate list. (I used the Bulk Actions Power-Up to make labeling and moving the cards easy.)
• I created a list called DONE!, which I placed in the left-most position, and when I complete a task I will move the card into that list. That gets the completed task out of the list of things to be done and allows me to see at a glance which projects I’m making progress on.

Here’s a picture of that board as it stands now. (I haven’t started attacking the tasks yet.)

Even though I’ve literally completed only one task, I am feeling so much better. Just having one place to put all these tasks is very helpful—they were just too much for my already-crowded daily task management board. My brain is no longer swirling with tasks and I have the comfort of knowing where to put tasks as they come to mind.

I’m looking forward to completing some of these projects and being able to go back to using my Daily Task Management board alone. But for now, I’ll use two boards (one for the projects, one for the daily tasks and those not related to these projects). I already feel an uptick in my productivity!

Tagged with: productivity, productivity technology, task management, to-do list, trello

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