The Importance of Task Managers in Getting Things Done
One of the important drivers in getting things done is to have a good list manager or what we call in common terms, a task manager. The role of this manager is as a repository for the activities that you want to do and probably check it off once done.
Task managers need not be on a computer. In fact, you can use your notebook as a task manager and it works as well as any hi-tech gadget. I will keep the discussion on which one is preferable for another day.
If you want to remember some activities to get it done at a later point of time, you have two choices. One, write it down on a piece of paper (or in a computer) or keep it in your mind. If you decide to use the latter, the chances of you remembering the task depends on certain chemical compositions in your mind. If your mind has to remember your designated tasks, then it needs a trigger and triggers are generated when there is a connection. If there’s no connection, then forget about getting that task done as your mind just doesn’t remember stuff.
Let me provide an example to substantiate the theory. If one of the tasks that you want to get done is to renew your web domain. You tell your mind that it is something that you would need to do once you get back home today. After a tiring day at office, you go back home, have dinner, watch TV and go to bed. Later the next day, you go back to office and while you are typing your intranet’s address in Internet Explorer, your mind reminds you at that point of time that you had to renew your web domain.
In the example stated above, when you started typing your intranet address in Internet Explorer, your mind found a connection and that triggered a chemical composition which raked the related task. The question posed – is your mind which is highly unreliable a good task manager? You know the answer. To makes things worse, this task manager made of flesh and bones deletes entries without you having a faintest scent about it. Let’s find some better alternatives and leave the mind to deal with emotional stuff.
You need a place where the activities can be written down or keyed in. It should be on a reliable substrate that can be depended upon. Keeping your activities listed on a notebook is perhaps the most popular and the simplest way to manage. However, we are in the hi-tech world and moving with the times, simplifies the task up to a certain extent. There are several task managers available, the ones that are actual applications that are installed on your systems or those that reside on the web, otherwise called web task manager or commonly called web application.
The advantages of using hi-tech are multi-fold. To name a few – 1. You can set reminders at your preferred time. 2. You can sync the tasks on your cellphone, home computer, PDA or any other compatible gadget. 3. Reliability is unquestionably more in hi-techs. You might quite easily lose your notebook or it could get drenched in rain. On the flip side, you could lose your Palm or a hard disk can crash. But, relatively, I believe that hi-tech is more reliable, any day.
Find a task manager that suits your needs and the one that you can be comfortable with. There is no point in getting a task manager that you can’t manage. Don’t go hi-tech if you are not a geeky kind of a person.
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