My name’s Zee and I’m a task management freak… I’ve tried rememberthemilk, todoist, sandy, basecamp to do’s and a host of others - but although all are superb apps, I always felt there was a more suitable out there.

Recently, i’ve been trying a brand new way of managing my tasks alongside our team tasks - and strangely it is working better than anything I have tried before. Let me explain, if you’re a project management geek like me, I think you’ll find this interesting:

1. One year ago we established our 5 year business goals & I also established my personal 5 year goals. That process naturally takes a little time, but is critical in forming direction for the company and yourself. We try and make each of these 5 year goals as simple and easily provable as possible (ie. I will weigh 75kg and have a 36″ waist is good. NOT, I will be in good shape.).
   We do this for every aspect of the business, and I personally did it for the four different areas of my life (aside from work) Personal, Relationships, Health & Money.
2. After these 5 Year goals have been set for each aspect of life and/or business, I then set a 1 year goal for each of the 5 year goals.
3. Finally, a list of quarterly goals are made for each 1 year goal. Again, these too have to be as specific as possible. These quarterly goals form the names for each one of your calendars on google calendar.
4. Now, moving onto the actual google calendar stage of this process. Start creating a calendar for each goal you expect to achieve within 3 months - i have 15 goals which I want/expect to achieve within 3 months fyi. Once done…
5. It’s time to literally think about each 3 month goal and exactly what needs to be done & when. So if you want to learn to become a dancer within 3 months, then add an event for “find a dance class”, “buy dancing shoes” etc… Just make sure you have put that task (event) in the right calendar so you always know which 3 month goal the task relates to. One tip is to also add different colours for each calendar - should make things easier.
6. Right, so by the end of it you should have a calendar full of your tasks, appointments and all of them focused on achieving goals which you set yourself. The important thing to remember is always think when you’re about to add a task “which 3 month goal is this helping me achieve?” if the answer is none, dump it…if it’s vitally important, then add it to a separate calendar entitled MISC and place it in there. But try you’re very best to not keep tasks which don’t directly correspond to your 3 month goals.

TIPS:

• To share tasks with your team, either simply share the calendar or just share the individual tasks.
• Use Quicksilver Add Google Calendar event plugin or Yahoo widget’s Google Calendar widget or Elias’ Quick Add Firefox Extension
• If you use firefox, add google calendar to open in your sidebar
• Use your default calendar (the top one which you can’t remove) as your ‘inbox’ calendar. So if you’re in a rush, just quickly add a task (event) to that calendar and put it into the correct calendar later.
• To ensure i can always come back to things i haven’t done: Every todo(event) i add I always put -todo after whatever it is i should do, eg. “run a mile -todo”. Then everytime i’ve done something i change it from “-todo” to “-done”. Then say a couple of weeks later you want to see what’s left to be done that you haven’t done - just search for ‘-todo’ and voila, you’ve got everything there.

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