Peace of Mind Organizing

Worth repeating: Bingo anniversary

23 March 2015

Back in 2011, I created a Bingo board to help me get non-urgent tasks done on a regular basis. I blogged about it four or five times and today have selected one of the most useful of those posts to repeat to spread the word about the value of building fun into your task management.

Here's how my bingo board looks today.

A year ago today, I first blogged about To-Do List Bingo. I created a bingo board after reading a blog post about social media bingo from my friend, Jacquelyn Kittredge of e-bakery.

I use my bingo board to help motivate me to do important, but not urgent, tasks on a daily basis. For me, that’s social media stuff, contacting past, prospective and current clients, pursuing guest post or speaking opportunities, doing family history research, and working on my new blog, Organize Your Family History.

Every time I do one of those things, I cover the space on the board. (I reshuffle the cards on the board every day.) At the end of the day, I take a look at the board and see what I need to do to get a bingo. And that’s usually motivation enough for me to do those tasks.

I love my bingo board for a bunch of reasons:

• It’s pretty
• It’s fun
• It’s flexible
• It gives me a sense of accomplishment for doing a bunch of small tasks
• It helps me get stuff done!

When I first started, I used Post-It® notes to cover up the spaces. That was visually unappealing and sort of fiddly (because sometimes they’d fall off), not to mention wasteful. A couple of months ago, I created decorative magnets by cutting out drawings of buttons from a calendar. Yesterday, I made a second set because I’ve been covering so many squares.

With the new magnets, the board has become even more satisfying for me. I just love it.

I’ve actually become sort of a proselytizer for To-Do List Bingo. I’ve blogged about it several times and I wrote an Organizing Guide about it, called TO-DO LIST BINGO! A game of completion + glee, for the whole family. In August of last year (after I’d been using it only a month!), I took my board on the road and did a segment on Great Day St. Louis, a local morning talk show.

These days, I’ve been getting triple and quadruple bingos on a regular basis and it makes me so happy. Sometimes people ask me what reward I get for getting a bingo and they seem surprised that the thrill of the bingo is reward enough for me. I guess I’m weird that way. (Certainly rewards could be attached to it, though.)

Tagged with: bingo, jacquelyn kittredge, motivation, productivity, task management, worth repeating

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