Lately I have been thinking and reading about Task and Time Management a bit (for work and private life). In this note I want to take a short memo of how I want to approach this currently.

Why is Task/Time Management needed in the first place?

First things first: Why is that even necessary? For me at least it boils down to the following:

• There are things I want to do and achieve (Also unfortunately there are more things I want to do than I have time for)
• There are things that need to be done even if I don’t want to (usually a lot of things)
• It feels like I should be doing more
• All of the above makes me feel overwhelmed

Usually Task/Time Management is framed as a “How to be more productive” problem. However at least in my case it is more of an emotional problem: I want to avoid feeling overwhelmed and instead want to feel in control over my life.

Soo, how to avoid feeling overwhelmed?

My current approach could be summarized as:

1. Start with a mindset of enoughness
2. Find your core values
3. Stop doing what does not align with your values
4. Collect all the tasks in one place (task inbox)
5. Go through your task inbox once every week to analyze and schedule tasks
6. Listen to your body and schedule breaks

I think in my case, much of the overwhelm came from thinking “I need to do X in order to finally feel good”. But actually I found that I could just be satisfied with where I was currently. Doing so takes a lot of the stress out of the process.

After having calmed down a bit then, it really helps to have clear values. Once you know your values I found it way easier to decide whether you should actually do a given task. (Especially when new things pop up.) Nowadays there are just way too many things that “have to be done”. If you don’t have a way of determining what is important for you, you will end up in an overwhelming task hell.

Also collecting everything in just one place and not having thousand lists helped me to actually feel like I am not forgetting everything. This is actually quite similar to what is done in Getting Things Done.

Finally putting everything in my calender helped me to not over-commit - If it is in your calender you see how much (or few) time you have left in a given week. This also helps when deciding whether you can actually start your new shiny project or you need to drop something you are already doing.