If you’re like me, you may have a lot of parallel running projects that all are constantly requesting a piece of your time. This can be quite stressful, because you are not really sure what you should be working on at a particular time. The system I use is the system that takes away this stress and gives you a feeling of control over all the projects.

There are 3 components:

First Component: Progress Calendar

This is the most important part of the system.

• First of all, a big sheet of paper is split up into weeks (or whatever granularity works for your projects).
• The high level tasks neccessary to be done for a particular project in a particular week are written on an orange piece of paper and stuck to the sheet.
• When the tasks are done, the orange coloured paper is removed and replaced with a green paper.
• The pink strip points to the current day, allowing you to guage in an instance what things from the past are still pending

Progress Calender

Second Component: White sheet of paper

• I buy a 500 stack of paper, and use a sheet every day. On this sheet is written everything I have to do on a high level. I.e, this sheet of paper has all the targetsI want to achieve, but without the actual steps neccessary to achieve them. Yes, I waste a lot of paper.
• The items on the paper should be items that could be finished in a few minutes to a few days, so the contents of the paper does not stay the same for months.
• When done, the items are striked out.
• On the next day, the items are all copied to a new sheet of paper, minus the ones that are striked out. The old paper is thrown away.

Third Component: Computer based todo lists

I’ve gone through many different ones. Currently, I use a text file. I use this to manage the details of the larger projects that are on paper. This list is synchronised across multiple computers with dropbox. At the bottom of this list are the long term and bigger things I want to achieve.