I want to follow on from my previous blog post where I discussed my dislike for using reminders on tasks in Outlook. If you have not read that yet, read it first before reading this blog.

One additional alternative to using reminders on tasks is this: create what I call the MYN Reminder Task.

What’s that? It’s a high priority task that is scheduled to pop into your Critical Now section, and its sole purpose is to remind you of something coming up soon. There’s no action per se, and it simply calls your attention to something due soon—but something not due today.

This is best explained with an example. Let’s say you’ve completed your taxes a week early and that they are due to be mailed in on April 15. You have a high priority task scheduled to appear April 15 stating “Mail in Taxes Today”. But April 15 is also a busy day for you; you’ve got lots of meetings and might not be looking at your task list very often during the day. So you might set a Reminder Task to pop up on April 14 just to give you a heads up of the upcoming deadline the next day. I use a format similar to the MYN follow up tasks; the task would look like this:

“R: File Taxes Tomorrow”

Why does this work? It works because, as an MYN user, you take the Critical Now section very seriously and examine it intently many times each day. So when this pops in to that section, you give it serious thought.

With Reminder Tasks there is no action to take other than immediately deleting the task after you see it. It has served its purpose of rekindling awareness of something that may have drifted from your memory.

Note, I would not use these reminder tasks all that often; I’d only use them for relatively important deadlines.

By the way, the other way to handle this in MYN is to do what I’ve been teaching for years, and that’s to set the start date on the main task a few days ahead of its deadline so that you see it early and accomplish some work on it ahead of time. So your main task might look like this: “DUE Apr 15 Mail in completed taxes” and then put an April 13 or 14 start date on it so it appears early in the Opportunity Now section. Then move it up to the Critical Now section on April 15.

But the MYN Reminder Task is a nice alternative to this because it helps avoid you forgetting to promote the early task to the Critical Now section. It also does not imply you have any work to do ahead of the deadline; it just gives you a heads up and you move on. Since you are likely to delete a Reminder Task, it also doesn’t clog up your task list day to day.

So consider adding the MYN Reminder Task to your toolkit in the MYN system; it may save you from missing something important.

Michael

If you’ve read my books, or taken my classes, then you know that I do not recommend you use the Outlook reminder feature on Outlook tasks, even when the tasks have a future deadline. People question me on that, wondering if I am really sure. So in this post, I want to tell you a little bit more about why I think using reminders on tasks in Outlook is wrong.

Reminders on appointments are good

First of all, remember that the recommendations of the 1MTD and MYN systems state this: if a task must be done at a certain time of day, then make an appointment out of it—put it on your calendar; don’t rely on the task list. A good example is a phone call that must be made at a certain time—put it on your calendar.

Then, any time you create an appointment, using Outlook’s appointment reminders is perfectly fine. Why? Because they pop up just before the event is due. There is no confusion about whether you need to act when they pop-up or not; for example if it is that phone call, and the agreed-to time is upon you, you must make the call—no question.

But don’t set arbitrary task appointments

In contrast, if a today-deadline task can be done at any time today, then put it on your task list; don’t schedule it on the calendar. The task list is a much better place to list tasks that you will work on when you can—working off a list is ideal for that. Why? Because such tasks have no appointed time. If you try to schedule tasks like this on your calendar, then you will be scheduling them at arbitrary times that have no teeth. You’ll find that when their time comes, since each task is not really due at the scheduled time, you’ll just keep working on something else you are focused on; or you’ll favor something else that seems more urgent in the moment. The result is you will be endlessly skipping scheduled tasks; and as a result, you’ll often be dropping them.

So use the tasks list for this instead, set aside time to work tasks in general, and just work tasks in priority order.

Why task reminders don’t work

And this helps explain why reminders on tasks don’t work. Like above, task reminders are appointments for things that in reality have no appointed time. If you use a task reminder and the reminder pops up, you will likely be focused on some other activity that is more appropriate at that point—and the reminder feels like an interruption. Because of that, you will usually ignore the reminder, either dismissing it or snoozing it to later. And then when it pops up later, you are likely to be focused on some other activity again and ignore it again. Soon you get in the habit of immediately dismissing or snoozing all task reminders and they become useless.

In 1MTD and MYN you don’t need task reminders

And using task reminders just doesn’t make sense in MYN and 1MTD anyway, for one major reason: if you are using the system correctly they are not needed. Using the rules in MYN and 1MTD, you will be checking your Critical Now list as often as every hour. And you will be checking your Opportunity Now list at least once a day; hopefully in the morning. So you will clearly see tasks that are due today, likely noting them quite early in the day. Since they are due today you’ll make sure they are highlighted in the Critical Now list. And as you repeatedly check your Critical Now list and see the item there, you’ll be consistently reminded to work on it. You don’t need a poorly timed popup reminder to do that.

Even more important is this: when you decide to look at your task list, it is usually because you are open to taking on a new task; that’s why you’re looking at the list—to see what to do next. So you are more likely to be in a frame of mind to start a new activity when you see it there—it won’t feel like an interruption in the way that task reminders do.

So, the MYN and 1MTD systems handle the need for a reminder without using them, and the systems do it in a better way. You don’t need reminders.

Task reminder feature unreliable in Outlook with MYN

Finally, the reminder field on Outlook is unreliable when used with MYN. Why? Because if you set and then change the start date of the task, which I recommend you do often in MYN, then the reminder date will change by the same number of days—you probably will not notice that or set it back. The result? The reminder will not trigger when it should and you’ll miss the deadline. So when consistently using the task start date (as in MYN), the task reminder field is an unreliable field and it is best to avoid it.

So use the MYN and 1MTD systems in Outlook as they are designed, and you’ll never need a reminder field on a task. Things just won’t slip by!

Michael

I have for years written that the urgency of tasks changes dramatically over time. Being aware of that helps you manage a large number of to-dos with less effort than you think possible. That’s because if you use a system like MYN—one that shuttles declining tasks out of view most of the time—and focuses effectively on ones that are important, you end up gaining time by not wasting it on tasks that could be skipped in the long run.

And the good news is that most tasks do in fact decrease in urgency over time—my experience is about 80 percent of the tasks we get ultimately fade in value. That’s because priorities move on quickly—over time much of what once seemed critical is now a “big yawn.”

But here’s the bad news–and the reason most of us cannot take advantage of this. When a task first arrives, you have no way to know which way the urgency will shift—will it get less urgent with time or more urgent? If you guess wrong and hide a task that ends up with increasing urgency, you may cause damage to yourself and others.

The only way to know which way your tasks will go is to keep an eye on them; you need to continue to track all tasks until you can tell their ultimate direction. But you cannot just put them in a huge list—you’ll never review the whole thing. Rather, you need a system that keeps them under control. And that’s what the MYN system does: it gives you a way to track all tasks with little effort and a way to reprioritize them as their long-term urgency emerges.

The result? You have a very easy, low-maintenance, simple system that keeps just the right focus on just the right tasks. You get the right things done, and you don’t spend a lot of time managing them.

And best of all, with MYN, the low priority items drop off the bottom of your list almost automatically. The result is you get lots of time back that may have otherwise been wasted—so you come out way ahead!

Michael

Thinking of your Inbox as the receiving area of an emergency room can help you see how to get it under control.

In an emergency room receiving area, there is often a nurse or doctor who quickly triages patients as they arrive, sending them off to appropriate doctors or places in the hospital. For that to work correctly, that nurse or doctor needs to make quick decisions and keep the room generally cleared. If the waiting room is overflowing and out of control, chaos reigns and people may even die.

In this triage, seriously injured or ill patients are taken right into medical treatment. People who they determine have longer-term or less-urgent conditions are put in a separate waiting room or are scheduled for later visit.

Non-actionable arrivals are also processed quickly. For example, when the postal service arrives with informational mail, it is filed away quickly (otherwise it would gum up the emergency room paperwork). Sales people trying to sell goods are dismissed immediately.

The key point here is that incoming events in the receiving area of the emergency room are processed and decided on quickly and moved on; they are not left in the receiving area. If that room is not kept relatively clear, then chaos results. If that happens, the triage nurse or doctor may lose track of who needs urgent attention and who does not. An incoming patient with serious conditions may get ignored and possibly even die in the chaos.

The lessons here for the Inbox should be obvious. Like patients in an emergency room, some of your incoming mail may need very urgent and immediate attention. Some with slower burn will need to be converted to tasks for later action (and placed in an appropriate 1MTD/MYN urgency zone). Some mail will be filed as information only, and some will be dismissed as sales junk. But in all cases, you want to clear the Inbox quickly so you can make those same quick decisions on the new e-mail that continues to rush in behind the old.

Naturally, the 1MTD and MYN systems have been designed to help you do that—to prevent any of your “patients” from dying on your watch!

Michael

I get this question sometimes: “The MYN and 1MTD systems insist on no more than 5 Critical Now items. But what if I have more than five?”

Well, the reason for the limit is that the list will become a blur if it gets too big, and then you will overlook something. So if you truly have more than 5, here are some strategies to cull it down:

• When you first notice there are more than five, pick off a few of the very quick ones and do them now. No time like the present to make progress.
• Combine related ones together. For instance if you have 4 calls to make today, make one task called “Today’s Calls” and put the details in the body of that task. The idea is to do all the calls in one sitting. But also recall my discussion of not using the MYN/1MTD list for operation duties that are better served by a dedicated software system. For example, use a CRM or sales management system that lists calls if your job is to make 25 sales calls per day; don’t rely on MYN/1MTD for those kinds of high-volume operational tasks.
• And of course, make sure the items on the list are truly Critical Now items. Recall, they need to pass the going home test to stay on the list. That test is: “Would you stay at work well past your normal departure time to complete these items if they were not done?” If the answer is no, then move them down to the Opportunity Now list.

Michael

Here’s a question I get in nearly every class I teach. “What do I do with low-priority e-mail that I don’t need to attend to now but I know I may want to get to later? I tend to leave these in my inbox until I can read them, and so emptying the inbox like you recommend is hard to do.”

My solution? Tag it with a “Read Later” Category in Outlook (or use a “Read Later” Label in Gmail), and immediately move it out of your Inbox. And then schedule blocks of time on slower days to catch up on your low-priority mail reading.

If any of that sounds like Greek to you, here’s some background. If you’ve read my books then you know that I recommend you file your mail into one folder, and try to empty your Inbox each day. You know I do not recommend filing into 40 different topic-named folders. If you must use topics, then tag the mail with Outlook Categories (or Gmail Labels), and put them in one single folder (called the Processed Mail folder in Outlook, and in Gmail just use the Archive space). You can view mail grouped by topics later.

So for low priority e-mails that you tend to let hang in your inbox, this is a great solution that allows you to quickly empty your inbox. Just tag that mail with a category or label called “Read Later,” move it immediately out of the Inbox, and then read it later when you have a scheduled block of time for lower priority activities. You can even have several of these tags: “Read Later High Priority” for example. Or even “Categorize Later” should you have a complicated category system and need more time to think through your assignments on read mail later.

The most important step though is to get that mail out of the Inbox quickly, on the same day if possible. The inbox should be a triage location—a quick-decision-making area for incoming mail. Make decisions quickly, convert some to tasks, and get the mail out of the inbox. An overloaded inbox hampers such quick decisions, and that leads to time wasted on rehashing old mail. And a jumbled Inbox allows requests to drop through the cracks. Rather, use the Inbox like the receiving lobby of an emergency room—quickly decide what to do with the new patient, and move them on quickly to the right place.

Michael

I do a number of radio interviews and later get the links sent to me and often forget to post them. Here is another from January:

http://www.insidepersonalgrowth.com/2012/01/podcasts/podcast-335-the-one-minute-to-do-list-with-michael-linenberger/

Michael

Here are links to a couple of recent radio interviews, should you like to listen!

Ohio Fox Radio station:

http://radio.cincom.com/2012/04/michael-linenberger/

Patricia Raskin talk radio

http://www.michaellinenberger.com/Recordings/PatriciaRaskinInterviewJan2012.mp3

Michael

We all get requests to do additional “work” many times a day. Most of those action requests are embedded in the e-mails we get all day long. Beyond the time just reading an e-mail, many e-mails can lead to substantial things we have to do—and doing them can add hours of work to our workday. Because of that, we are all getting the feeling that we’ve got way too much to do, that we cannot get our core work done.

Well, there is an 80/20 rule on all these requests that are coming in. The rule goes like this: 80% of action requests we get by e-mail will decline in importance over time if left undone. Only 20% will get more urgent if not done quickly. If we use this rule appropriately, we can start to solve our feeling of overwhelm and scattered work focus, and accomplish a lot more of our core work.

Why is this rule so true? It’s true because in this fast changing business world, nearly all business priorities change rapidly. It’s true—the priorities of your boss, your clients, your firm, your colleagues, and even your own priorities, all change very rapidly as time goes by. So something that seemed very important on Monday may be much less important by Friday, as new priorities have moved in.

What are the implications of this rule? The number one take away from this rule is this: never work lower priority, short-term needs at the expense of high priority ones. If you spend most of your day on lower priority, short-term needs, then you’re missing opportunities to get your important work done. And you are wasting your time on work that, given the test of time, you really should have passed on.

But because of the way our attention span and communications trend, most of us DO favor the lower priority, short-term needs. Why is that? They are easy to do and feel like quick-wins. And we are afraid if we don’t do them immediately we will lose track of them. And since they usually end up right in front of us, we just do them.

E-mail is a perfect example of this. The way e-mail inbox is configured, it always puts the latest e-mail at the top of our list—even if it is very low priority. And if we want to be diligent, that’s where we start, at the top. Some of us feel like we have to get to every e-mail that comes into the inbox or else we’re not being proactive—not being responsive. Due to our desire to be helpful, and our training to be responsible, (and often due to an undisciplined attention span), we do spend time attending to nearly everything that crosses our plate.

However, working e-mail diligently is absolutely the worst way to spend your time. 80% of those e-mail action requests will probably expire or decrease greatly in importance over the days and weeks ahead and so if you didn’t spend your time working on them there would be less impact anyway.

And this is not just an e-mail issue. Note that our attention span works the same across all modes of incoming requests and information. The latest phone call, pop-up alert, instant message, text message, or conversation—those are what we allow to dictate what we work on, and that leads to our important work never getting done.

However, this is not just a matter of committing to your important work and dropping everything else—ignoring all or most e-mail for example. We cannot just drop everything else.  The trouble is, you are never sure which of those requests really is in the 20% until some time has passed and you see the priority go up. Many things could mushroom later if not tracked, and that could lead to a career limiting issue.

The Solution

The solution is to use the MYN system or the One Minute To-Do List (1MTD) system. In that system you triage mail as it comes in (read or scan it quickly to gauge importance), but you do not work it immediately (unless really quick). Instead you convert e-mail action requests to tasks, record all other requests, and then work them off your prioritized list in priority order. Once these are on your prioritized list, the low priority items get pushed down and you focus first on high priority items.

But the key is that MYN and 1MTD also provides a structured way to periodically track the lower priority ones too, to make sure you don’t drop any emerging priorities that are in those deferred actions. You see, MYN and 1MTD give you a simple way to store low priority requests out of sight, but with a scheduled review to revisit them regularly. In MYN it’s called Defer-to-Review. By using Defer-to-Review to properly place lower priority actions out of your main action view, but still reviewing them appropriately, you can both focus on high-value core tasks and not let any issues drop through the cracks. In today’s work world where we get tens of new action requests each day, any of which could bite you over time, this is the only way to stay focused, be productive, but not lose track of the hundreds of other to-dos, any one of which could still be important.

And that’s the main point. Given how much is coming at us these days, we all now know that we will never get it all done. Many things will have to drop off the bottom. MYN/1MTD is a system that segments everything coming at you, almost automatically, so that you will focus first on that 20 percent of requests that really make sense to do and still keep track of the rest. That’s what the MYN and 1MTD system does for you.

Michael

I feel we all have three primary personal work management tools:

1. the in-box,
2. the 1MTD/MYN to-do list,
3. and the calendar…

…and I feel that we should make sure we keep these three primary management areas clean and well maintained.

Specifically, make sure you get rid of non-useful information in these areas. The calendar is usually not too bad, but the other areas get out of control quickly.

If there is old useless information in your in-box or to-do list, you will start to get into habit of repeatedly skipping over broad portions of each, and then the tool becomes weaker, less useful. And you’ll start missing some important items there.

So file mail from your Inbox immediately after you triage it (except for deferred replies, and process those within a day or so).

And don’t let your 1MTD/MYN Critical Now or Opportunity Now tasks list get full of tasks that you skip over week after week. Instead, schedule out tasks you know you are not going to work on soon. Or put them in the Over the Horizon section. Otherwise you will just glaze over when viewing entire sections of your list, and then the tool becomes useless.

And in ToodleDo, don’t let the Significant Outcome (SOC) section get old. You’ll just stop looking at that section if you do. Set start dates ahead on those to keep it well focused.

Using 1MTD and MYN, it’s not hard to maintain these tools–just do it!

Michael