How to Make Sure No Task Falls Thru The Cracks! | Part 1 Clutter Video Tip

http://www.ClutterDiet.com Get organized with home organizing tips from professional organizers at The Clutter Diet. Finding the right way to manage your tasks can be a hard nut to crack. There are so many options out there- how do you know what to try? In today’s video Lorie Marrero is sharing some key considerations when deciding how to manage your tasks. Following these strategies will make getting things done less stressful and more productive. Filling in the cracks in your to do list just might keep you from cracking up. These Clutter Video Tips are posted frequently here on our clutterdiet organizing channel. You can search Twitter for #ClutterVideoTip also to find comments on our organizing tips. Lorie Marrero is the creator of ClutterDiet.com and the author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. Lorie also serves as the national spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International and ambassador of the Donate Movement.

Hi I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and online program. Today we’re talking about electronic vs. paper to-do lists. People ask me this all the time, “Which is better?” And the answer is, “It depends.” It depends on your brain type, your lifestyle, the kind of job you have. There is a lot of personal preference involved in how you set up your task list. There are an infinite number of ways to set up a task list. So there’s no wrong answer. You just need to do it the way it works for you.

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of each. With electronic task lists you have a lot more pros than cons. There’s really a great set of advantages to doing it this way. But it might just not be how your brain works, so that might be enough for it to fail for you. Let’s go through why it’s such a great idea. If you have something like Outlook for example, you can integrate your e-mail, your calendar, your task list, and your contacts all together in one place and be able to go seamlessly between all of those functions. And that’s a big advantage. You can sort and filter and categorize to your heart’s content. You never have to re-copy anything on a fresh sheet of paper. You don’t have any fear of losing the information because hopefully you have backups of all of this and it’s probably on multiple devices that you own. And also it gives you audible reminders so it can pop up,make a noise and tell you what to do and when to do it.

The cons of using electronic task lists are that it’s not as fast of a capturing method. You’re trying to write something really quick, you’ve got to turn it on, put the pass code in, navigate to the app, and type it in with your finger. That’s certainly not as efficient as picking up a piece of paper and a pen and jotting something down really fast. Also you have to have a device with you. If you happen to not have one, you have to use a piece of paper anyway. And you may have technical problems. Maybe you don’t have a backup.

With paper, you have a lot of pros and cons too. I want you to think about the way your brain works in terms of paper. If you think about two different ways of considering your brain type, if you are a concrete thinker you’re more comfortable when you have a tangible thing that you can touch and feel and see and have right in front of you all the time, and you might not be so comfortable if things are out of sight and out of mind. If you put papers into a file drawer and shut the drawer, you might be kind of unsettled by not seeing those papers. If you are an abstract thinker you’re the kind of person that is comfortable with the idea that the information is living out there in the cloud somewhere and that you’ve got your files in a drawer and it’s shut and you know that those files are in there, and your brain kind of adapts to that. If that is a really strong preference for you, that you’re very concrete in your thinking, and you’re very kinesthetic and want to touch things and use ink and paper, then you might be happier using a paper task list. It is a super fast capturing method, it is very accessible, it feels very satisfying to cross things off with a pen, but you can lose this. You want to put your name and phone number and offer a reward in the front cover in case you leave this in a coffee shop or something. Also, you have to look at it for it to remind you of something. You may have to supplement your queuing system for how you’re going to reminder yourself by actually using your phone alarms or something.

These are the pros and cons of each type. I want to let you know that it’s okay for you to change your mind. I have gone back and forth over the years using paper and electronic versions of things for various reasons. It’s healthy to re-evaluate and correct your system so that nothing falls through the cracks.

We’ll see you next time. And may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.

Видео How to Make Sure No Task Falls Thru The Cracks! | Part 1 Clutter Video Tip канала lorie.marrero