Everyday Systems

For 2008, I've started tracking a new habitcal tag: "tasks."

It works like this: every day I do all my chain of self command tasks, I not only mark a star on the card as I'd been doing before, but now I also give myself a green success on the habitcal. If I don't get everything done, then no star -- and red.

"tasks" is a bit of a grab bag tag, but I think it'll be a good way to use the motivational power of the habitcal for all the other stuff going on in my life without having spend half my waking hours keeping track. If some of the individual, routine tasks on my card turn out to be particularly important or challenging, maybe I'll promote it at some point to its own top level tag.

It'll also be interesting statistically. How good am I really at daily task management? I guess I could find the answer now by going through my box of 365 index cards from 2007 and counting stars, but with the habitcal it will jump right out at me.

Reinhard

OK, one month of "tasks" down.

http://everydaysystems.com/habitcal/vie ... te&t=tasks

Not bad -- but definitely a lot spottier than my other habits. It'll be interesting to see if habitcal reporting will encourage better compliance... I think it has already (it'll be easy enough to see if this is true if I retroactively add some 2007 data from my card box).

Reinhard

I'm impressed!

I think the combination of habitcal and chain of self command cards are really helpful because of what I'm going to call the "woody allen principle of self improvement." They give you a big incentive to SOMEHOW address all of your todos -- to "start" each one at least so you have some pretext to cross it off and get the visual reward. Since "80% of success is showing up" that translates to a lot of real success.

Reinhard