A new year often brings a sense of overwhelm, especially when you have unfinished tasks from the previous one. How can you tackle your to-do list without losing your motivation or focus? One strategy that I use and recommend is the Ticket Journal Method. It's a straightforward way to organize your tasks into smaller and more manageable pieces. Here's how it works, with some concrete examples to illustrate it.
Tools: Checklists and Kanban
I like to use checklists for everything I do, because they help me remember things and reduce my stress. I learned this from reading the Checklist Manifesto, which I often recommend to my colleagues. When I have a task to complete, I make a checklist of the steps I need to take and mark them off as I go. This way, I can easily see how much progress I have made and what is left to do. This is like the agile concept of "definition of done", which defines the criteria for a task to be considered done.
Kanban boards are a simple and effective way to organize your tasks and track your progress. You can use three columns to represent the various stages of your work: To-do, In-Progress, and Done. This helps you prioritize your tasks, avoid multitasking, and see what you have accomplished. Kanban boards are widely used in agile project management, software development, and personal productivity. You can learn more about kanban from various online resources. Here is an example of a 3-column kanban board with some random words and symbols generated by AI.
One way to improve your productivity is to use a tool that allows you to organize your tasks into a kanban board with cards, and then break down each card into smaller subtasks using checklists. For this example, I’m using an app called Flat (https://flat.app) that supports these two concepts. You can use any task tracker, or project management tool you like if it supports this hierarchy: kanban board with cards, cards with embedded checklists. Flat calls these cards “topics”, others call them “tickets”, it really doesn’t matter. If they have checklists, you are good to go.
Welcome to week #1
To organize our cards, we’ll follow the ISO standard for calendar week numbers. This way, we can keep track of our progress and deadlines more easily. When you create a card on the journal board, please include your initials in the title. This will help us identify who is working on what and avoid confusion.
Start your journal with your feelings about the week. This journal is mostly for you, but it might be seen by others, so set an informative tone. One goal is to avoid meetings by answering the question “What are you working on?” with a link to your journal for the week.
Load the checklist
A lot of people have high expectations for what they can accomplish in a week. I think that's fine, because we can always carry over the unfinished tasks to the next week. So, don't stress about how long your list is, just write down everything you want to do.
One way to organize your tasks in Flat is to use different checklists for Daily Chores and Weekly Goals. This lets you reset the Daily checklist every morning and mark off the chores as you do them. The Weekly checklist helps you track your progress on longer-term objectives.
More to come…
This concludes our session for Monday. You can expect two more updates from me this week: one in the middle of the week and another one on Friday. I will share more tips on how to manage your lists, enhance your journaling, and get ready for next week.
Chat me up on threads
I have switched to threads as my main platform for sharing tech insights and updates. Threads has been a positive way to have focused and meaningful conversations with like-minded people. You can find me and other tech enthusiasts by searching for the hashtag “Tech Threads” or following me at @marks.wiki@threads.net.