1. Real simple 2. Require minimal effort
If it fails both of those criteria, chances are you won't stick with it for too long. The planning itself becomes something you have to plan into your schedule, for example from the post:
"The bulk of my weekly planning takes place on Sunday evening."
Sorry but that's not going to work for me.
Appreciate what works for me doesn't work for everyone though
"I find this works best to do the night before / or each morning (rather than do every day on Sunday evening) as I found that things can change during the week (meetings go in the diary etc) which throws everything out."
If I got my three tasks done, it was a productive day and anything else I did was gravy. If I didn't, I forced myself to look back at what I spent my time on that day. The three-task system helped me get focused to avoid "fake work" like meetings, emails, etc.
I eventually coded it up into a simple tool for myself that I still use every day. I haven't focused on marketing so I'm honestly the only user, but I'd love if the folks here could check it out and tell me what you think - http://three.do
I image it will do really well :)
My eventual plan is to build a team version, so instead of asking your teammates, "what are you working on today?" you could just check out their three most important tasks. There would also be a weekly wrap up email sharing who did what for the week.
I found that without a daily reminder email, I forgot to write out my tasks for the day, so I built out a light-weight web app to scratch my own itch and build the habit.
I've also tried variations around the number of tasks with one thing, five things, ten things, etc. Three primary things a day seems to be best amount for me to compete each day, but I'm sure the number of tasks probably depends on personal preference.
- The sooner I start hacking after waking up in the morning the better.
- I wake up an hour earlier than necessary and hack from a coffee shop (with a press pot) before my commute starts.
- I budget the time during my commute (train) in 5-10 minute goal-oriented intervals.
- I listen to Bach piano contrapunctus if the ambient noise gets distracting. I find it hard to get enter the zone quickly with a hiphop mix or any kind of hipster music.
But the question is: why? Why fade the text content from white to black when the content is below the fold and by the time I see the content it's already black? It seems quite a useless effect to me
I'm already late, so I need to hack myself and sprint to the trainstation.
Hacking away at some wordpress themes and finally a master hack to change the colorscheme of my xterm.
I wake up to my smurf alarm clock, quickly smurf myself
up and go to shower, I smurf through it quickly and smurf
myself dry with a towel. Then I proceed to smurf my
socks, pants and other smurf essentials before smurfing
my commute to work.
I'm already late, so I need to smurf myself and sprint
to the trainstation.
Smurfing away at some wordpress themes and finally a
master smurf to change the colorscheme of my xterm.