what makes me happy.

How to GTD when you have too much to do!

Having a thousand projects going at once, it’s so important to have a way to organize what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, and understanding what needs to happen next.

So, the app called “todoist”… I’ve had it for a long time… and for the longest time, I just thought it was a glorified to do list app. But holy guacamole! It has been so useful on our house project-and I want to describe how we’ve been using it to stay on track, so that if anyone else out there is looking at their home remodel (or really, any other huge project) and feeling overwhelmed, you’ve got one more tool in your toolbox to be a badass.

First, I want to just chat about a few features I like, and then tell ya bout the simple meat and potatoes of how this is really powerful.

INBOX So first, there’s an “inbox” that is just literally a place where you get your list out of your head and on paper. Something just pop into your head that you know you need to do/look into/think about later/etc.? Just put it into your inbox. Have a one-off kind of project that doesn’t fit into your categories-just add it to your inbox. Boom, done!

JUST TYPE IT It’s set up to be intuitive. So if you type in “write a blog post every sunday”, it will put in a task “write a blog post” and then it will create a recurring task for every Sunday. You’re welcome to go in and click buttons to assign it to every Sunday, but it’s so much quicker to just write what you want! I’m not even sure how you’d click buttons for this one since the days of the week would change… I typed in today, “give Ella a bath every 3 days”. Boom. Added. So cool.

ALL THE OTHER LITTLE SHIT Yes, of course, it’s got where you can move tasks up and down, or mark items as higher priorities (actually 4 different priority levels), you can share it so multiple can work on it. You can even email your todoist a task and it’ll add it to the correct place for you.

HOW WE’RE USING IT TO ORGANIZE THE HOUSE REMODEL Okay, we’re here. Right near the end. Most of the house is… pretty functional. But the devil is in the detail. So we have our projects around the house under one project in todoist: “Our Dream House”. Under that, we’ve got a board for each room. The boards go in order of what rooms I want done from first to last. Then, the tasks on each board go in order of what I want us to get done from first to last.

I color code them with the priority levels. You can make the bullet/check box turn from no color, to red, yellow, or blue. I use red for tasks we have everything to be able to get done. I use blue for tasks we need to order something to get that task done.

Then, everyday when we are making our plan for the day, we start on the first board, do the first task; if we can’t do that task for whatever reason, we do what we need to do to make sure we will be able to do it ASAP. Then we move down the list and do whatever we can that isn’t contingent on a task above it. Then move on to the next board and continue the same process.

This takes so much of the stress and decision making out of the day-to-day decisions on where the fuck to just start!