How I Organize My To Do List

Lots of people ask me how I manage all of the stuff I have going on with the business and the side projects. It hasn’t been easy in the past year to manage all of this growth! We ended up opening the third store, landed a large contract, hired nine employees + two contractors, grew the LinkedIn group that I own and I published an ebook–all since the new year started. That’s a lot in nine months and that is a lot on the “to do list”.  Not only is that all hard to keep track of, I use many computers for work and keeping one to do list on one computer is not good for me. So I found a nifty solution to help me with this organizational stuff.

Here is what I do to keep it all under control. Below are the steps.

1.) I have installed on my computer (and all my techs computers too) a tool called “Dropbox”. Click on the link to install it for free and use 2 gigs.

2.) Then I create a folder called “to do”.

3.) Then I open notepad (to find, go to the Start menu->Accessories->Notepad) and start my to do list, be sure to save in your new Dropbox folder.

4.) Then go round up your to do lists from other sources (take off your paper list, emails, all the post it notes by your desk, etc) and type them all up, order doesn’t matter right now.

5.) Now after you have the list all typed up, underneath the lists type this in

• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday
• Friday
• Saturday
• Sunday

6.) After that, start at the top of your list and take those items and cut/paste them into the days below. Not everything on your list needs to be done on Monday and as you go through the list, you will see that Monday’s items are more critical and Friday’s are more “back burner”.

7.) Now save your file.

8.) At this point, you should have a nice tidy list of things to do everyday for the week, your paper work should all be shredded and your desk in order. HAH! Or not…but mine is usually quite tidy as I try to keep that file open all day/everyday. When I am on the phone with someone and I need to call them back, I put it on my “day” of the to do list. If I have to do something before that call, I put it in the day or two before’s day and write down “Research Jackie’s email issue” so I know to do that before the call.

Yep, I still use my Outlook calendar. Nope, I don’t use the tasks. Mostly because the task list doesn’t follow me computer to computer at the three locations I go to for work.

Two final tips: Using dropbox is nice because it saves a copy “in the cloud” that you can get from any computer in the world and you can use it on your smart phone. So you are never really without it, its very nice and a time saver.

Tags: Computer Repair St. Paul MN, Computer support St. Paul Minnesota, Saint Paul Computer repair

Category: General