You can't eat all 10 frogs in one day, but you might be able to swallow a couple of frogs every morning. Get into a habit of deep work. Your frog should take between 1-4 hours to complete. You can use Asana or Todoist to tag your tasks according to priority and pick out the most important one every morning. This task creates some degree of.
- Brian Tracy, inspired by a Mark Twain’s saying, introduced the frog-eating idea in the productivity field. With our new Nozbe.how template you will learn everything you need to know about eating frogs, meaning: getting your hardest tasks done! Simply check out this step-by-step template and say farewell to procrastination.
- Doist: The remote company behind Todoist & Twist.
Behance’s popular Action Method online service shuttered on June 1st. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Action Method, here’s a brief rundown, courtesy of Lifehacker:
“The Action Method proposes that you leave every event, whether it’s a meeting or a brainstorming session, with a set of concrete tasks you can perform, called ‘action steps.’ Each item is its own to-do, and they’re kept separate from ‘references,’ or the materials you need to accomplish those items.”
The Lifehacker article also notes that many productivity apps can be adapted to work with the Action Method. While Behance suggested a couple of decent services that can be used as successors to their web app, they didn’t mention my new task manager of choice, Todoist, as one of them. And Todoist can really work well in terms of setting up a basic framework that supports the Action Method.
Projects
This is typical for any system, where you can set up projects where tasks will be assigned. With the Action Method “action steps” serve the same purpose as tasks, and get assigned to projects. In Todoist, simply create projects as you usually would to set up the basic framework for implementing the Action Method.
This is where the colour-coding feature can come in handy. You can assign colours to projects that are current (I usually colour these green), projects that are on hold (I usually colour these red), and projects that are yet to be moved on (I usually leave these the default colour of grey). Colour-coding allows you to see at a glance what projects are active, and you can also move around projects to get a better view of what you need to focus on regularly.
Todoist also allows you to layer projects within one another, so you can create a larger project to represent an area of responsibility (much like David Allen’s GTD methodology — and the book Getting Things Done is now available to digest quicker than ever through Blinkist) and then place related projects inside of them.
Action Steps
Action steps are, as mentioned, tasks. As with any capturing of tasks, you should make them as actionable as possible by starting off each of them with a verb. Since these are single action steps, they can be done without having to be broken down any further. In Todoist, you can add labels to these if you’d like (to act as contexts), but labels are going to be your best friend for the next component of the Action Method.
References
References are items that are directly related to projects, but aren’t actionable. In order to differentiate these from action steps, it’s best to label then in Todoist with the label “@reference” or something similar. Since todoist allows you to have multiple labels per action step, you’ll be able to assign context to references as well. The key to making sure that references are useful in the Action Method approach is to assign them to projects as you enter them.
Backburner Items
Backburner items are items that are on hold, but might be something you’ll work on later. If you’re more accustomed to GTD, then these items would be much like the “Someday/Maybe” context. In Todoist, the best way to deal with backburner items is to create a big project and name it “Backburner” and then place any future action steps and references in it. Then when you’re ready to take those things off of the backburner, move them to the appropriate project. You can also create smaller projects within the Backburner project (as outlined above in the “Projects” section) so that you can bring entire projects off of the backburner as you’re ready to move forward with them.
The Action Method works well for a lot of people who are just beginning to explore task management because it is simple and scales well. Julien Smith has been a long time practitioner of the Action Method, and the approach is described in great detail in Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen. If you’re a Todoist user and are looking for a productivity methodology that is simple to set up and doesn’t have a steep learning curve, then the Action Method is definitely worth a try.
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Being a solopreneur and work-from-home consultant, I routinely evaluate tools and methodologies to stay productive and focused, while maintaining the work-life balance.
Recently, I have started to use Todoist, an online task management app and to-do list. Todoist offers integration with lots of apps including Gmail, Google Drive and Dropbox that enhances productivity and makes it easier to manage the digital life.
How Todoist works:
Todoist allows task management through Projects, Labels and Filters. In Todoist, tasks represent actions that could have fixed, or recurring, due dates. A project is a collection of related tasks. Labels are used to present the context of the task, while filters are used to create views based on projects and labels.
Todoist Productivity Tips:
In order to get the best out of Todoist, and use it to become more productive, I have found these tips and hacks very useful.
Utilize the Inbox project. Todoist comes with a default Inbox project. This project can be used as the starting point. During my work day, I dump every idea and action item in the Inbox. Once the day ends and I am in review mode, items from Inbox are moved to relevant projects.
Email to Inbox: Todoist has a plugin for Gmail that turn emails into tasks. These tasks link back to the original email. More details on the link below
Add tasks in a project via email. Emails can also be turned into tasks by forwarding them to projects. Each project has a unique email address. The subject line will become the task name, and the body of the email will be added as a comment. All attachments smaller than 25MB will also be attached.
Add links. Urls saved in Todoist tasks are clickable. This is a great feature to save links for later reference.
List to tasks. It is possible to quickly generate a set of tasks from a list. Just copy and paste the list to an open task and Todoist will convert it to multiple tasks, one task per list item. This is a great time saver.
How I use Todoist:
My Todoist set up looks like this:
Projects:
Todoist Windows 10
- Inbox: The starting point and the dumping ground. I use this project to dump all ideas, daily collections, emails etc. At end of the day, everything in Inbox is either acted upon or moved to the relative project.
- Goals: My goals for this year, one of which is to become more proficient in Python.
- Clients: Everything related to the clients go here.
- Personal: This is for personal stuff including tasks that involve family and home.
- Self Work: Contains the ever growing list of my solo projects.
- Routine: This is divided into three sub projects, daily, weekly, and monthly. Routines are things that I have to do due to necessity. Routines include paying bills, buying groceries etc.
- Someday / Maybe: Tasks without deadlines. This includes books to read, videos to watch, places to visit etc.
Labels:
Labels give context to tasks. A task can have multiple labels.
- Home: Covers everything related to home and family.
- Morning: Morning is the time of day when my energy levels are high. This is why tasks that require high energy (client work, coding etc) are done @Morning. I follow the Eat that Frog principle, which teaches to do the most difficult task first. [More about it here]
- Day: Tasks that require low energy (reading news, checking email, social media etc) are assigned @Day
- Evening: Late evenings are for coding, planning and reading.
- Errands: All chores and routine activities are marked as @Errands
- Ideas: Every time I have an idea for a product feature, or anything at random, it is stored with @Ideas for future review.
- Payments: All payable tasks are tagged @payments.
- Waiting: Tasks that require input from others are marked @Waiting.
A word of caution: Use Todoist to manage your life, don’t live by it – meaning, you don’t have to check the app in every 5 minutes.
How To Use Todoist
Do you Todoist? If yes, I would like to know about your setup.
Resources:
Eat that Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time [get from here]
Todoist blog is the first stop to learn more about the features and use cases. It has an excellent usage guide, a tutorial on labels and filters, and the email plugins.
The Reddit sub is another great place to learn about Todoist. [link here]
Todoist Website
Carl Pullein’s Youtube channel is a good resource for Todoist, and productivity tips in general. Couple of videos that I recommend are, this and this.
Python Developer in Karachi, Pakistan. Interested in Web Scraping | Data Mining | Web Bots | Python Development using Django. [Check my Portfolio here]
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Todoist Eat The Frog Game
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