Quarters

Even allowing for everything going on last year, I didn’t get much done and I’ve been wondering how to improve that.

Managing tasks when doing client-work is never a problem. Everything’s usually in GitHub Issues and Projects and every hour/day/week I can see what needs doing.

But personal tasks are a different matter. Many of these have no specific deadline and are easy to continually put off. e.g. improvements to my various websites, or little DIY projects.

Years ago, when it was all the rage, I read Getting Things Done and I did and do like many of its ideas. But like most productivity processes it’s geared towards busy people managing a flood of often urgent tasks: daily and weekly reviews, prioritising tasks, triaging inboxes, etc.

My problem is that most of my tasks – and there really aren’t that many – are not urgent. So I never do them. And they sit around for weeks, months or years, and then I feel bad, and they weigh down upon me, and so I ignore them more, and so on and on.

After watching Dan Catt’s recent cheery Quarternotes video I started wondering if breaking time up into quarters would be useful to me too:

Three months is a manageable chunk of useful time. I could decide on a bunch of big and small things I’d want to get done over the next quarter. That would give some sense of mild urgency (“Got to get these done before April!”) but not the work-like pressure of smaller time periods (“This must be finished by end-of-play!”, “I have to clear the decks by the weekend!”). And it’s less overwhelming than using an entire year – there are only so many of those to go around.

If you have three months’ worth of tasks, there’s flexibility about the order in which to do them. And, if I don’t get too ambitious, there’s plenty of room for ad-hoc tasks to pop up, as well as other events like holidays, illnesses, emergencies, laziness, etc.

So now I’m working out how best to manage this. Like all changes to productivity, the first chunk of time must be consumed by choosing tools and methods.