Habit: Organize & Prioritize your Master List
The habit of keeping a master list of all your stuff-to-do is a must if you want to feel on top of everything that demands your attention. There are lots of benefits of a Master List habit, but a couple problems can arise.
MASTER LIST ORGANIZING FEATURES
The Master List in DailyBalance has several features that can help with these problems of overwhelm and distraction.
The first level of organization in the Master List are the “Home” and “Work” Domains. These serve to separate the different areas of your life, while enabling a single place to work for both parts of your life. This is the first step to controlling the size of your Master List.
The additional organization steps becomes important when your Master List starts to get big. The Master List has a built in set of root folders that give you a bit of structure and a way of taming a large list. These are the folders and the organizing benefits they provide:
INBOX FOLDER
The Inbox folder is a special folder where new tasks collect. This helps keep your Master List organized by collecting new stuff and then letting you decide where they belong.
The Inbox Processor is a feature that can help you quickly move tasks out of your Inbox folder. This can be launched as part of the Daily Review Assistant at the start of your day.
INBOX FOLDER
The Inbox folder is a special folder where new tasks collect. This helps keep your Master List organized by collecting new stuff and then letting you decide where they belong.
The Inbox Processor is a feature that can help you quickly move tasks out of your Inbox folder. This can be launched as part of the Daily Review Assistant at the start of your day.
TRIGGERS FOLDER
This is the other special folder and is the place where you manager your Triggers. Triggers are the way DailyBalance handles recurring and future tasks.
This helps to reduce clutter in your Master List by keeping tasks out of view until you can take action on them. For example, there’s no point in having “Pay the bills” in your task list all month when you aren’t going to do it until the end of the month.
THIS WEEK, UPCOMING & SOMEDAY FOLDERS
These are the urgency based folders that you can use to keeping your Master List manageable. Move tasks into these folders based on when you think you should consider working on them.
It is a good idea to offload tasks to Upcoming and Someday if they aren’t immediately actionable. The This Week folder should contain just your “active” tasks and projects. This will prevent the overwhelm and distraction when glancing at your Master List.
It’s a great habit to do a weekly review and keep your This Week folder up to date. Your Upcoming folder can’t be ignored, instead you should go through it at the start of the week to see if anything is becoming more urgent.
This will make planning your day a snap since you only need to go through the items in your This Week folders each day.
PRIORITIZING
Using the urgency-based folders is one part of prioritizing the tasks and projects in your Master List. Within each of those folders, you can organize your tasks and projects by priority if your list is still large.
This can simply be done by dragging to reorder the items in your list. This is the most natural way to handle priorities since one task is only high priority in relation to other tasks in your list.