This morning I started getting stressed; I was mentally listing all the things I wanted to accomplish this weekend: meditate, practice pre-race meals, go for a long run, catchup with friends, go to The Paddock, go food shopping, go clothes shopping, make calls, visit Dad, watch football, clean the house, do laundry etc. etc.
When I tried to go out at lunch time to get two types of shopping done (as well as eat) I knew I was pushing the boundaries of manicness and decided to stop. I looked at my long to-do list for the weekend and decided to focus on a couple of priorities:
1. Go to The Paddock - it's been three weeks and I need to know if any of the plants are still alive.
2. Catchup with friends - a couple of friends have just moved back to Perth after a couple of years in England. I don't want to cut short our catchup to go shopping or running or anything else.
Everything else can wait. I won't starve to death without more groceries, I don't NEED that new shirt this weekend and if I don't manage to meditate or go running for one week it's not the end of the world.
I'm sure I'll manage to fit in a few more things but by focusing on my priorities I can relax and enjoy the things I do have to do, without worrying about all the things I don't.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Last week I copied a handful of my weekend to-do list tasks over from Astrid to three new to-do list apps: Google to-do list, Asana and ToDoist to see which worked best for me.
In fairness I wasn't able to setup reminders for ToDoist without a premium account, which I would have considered paying for if no other apps gave me the same functionality for free, but they do. So I won't.
Google's to-do list is just too simple and boring for me - you can set dates that tasks are due on, but no time of day and no reminders. I guess Google expect you to put your tasks into your calendar for this kind of functionality, but I like to have calendar appointments and tasks as two separate lists with dates, times and reminders for both.
That leaves Asana to do lists; I was able to easily synch my Asana to-do list with my Google calendar so all my reminders went off successfully. It seems to be an app for team to-do lists rather than for one person but it is relatively user friendly, although I named my team 'Freedom Tasks' without realising the program would add the word Tasks to the header, so now my page is titled "Freedom Tasks Tasks" and I can't find any way to edit this.
As well as having multiple reminders going off from different apps, Mike was also synching our iCal to Google calendar so we had an entertaining few hours on Sunday where every thing in the house seemed to bleep as all our usual and extra reminders went off every 15 minutes or so.
Although Asana won the best-of-three to-do list test this weekend I'm not 100% convinced it's the new app for me. Astrid is still better - she tweets like a bird when I have something to do, gives me cheeky encouragement to get off my buttocks and do the task as well as congratulations (and a feeling of fulfillment) when I check that box to show it's completed.
Wow I just realised I enjoy a LOT of encouragement to accomplish my tasks! Well that gives me a sense of direction to look in before I review any more task lists. I don't know when Astrid is going to stop working so I can't leave it too long...
Talk about timing! After blogging yesterday about looking for a new e-calendar similar to Astrid, I received an update from Astrid that outlined the fact they are shutting down the app!
Soon I will be looking for a new to-do list app as well. There is certainly plenty of them out there to choose from, but I live off my daily reminders; I don't trust myself to remember what day it is without a reminder - so I'm looking for a good one.
Astrid is good because it uses humour to encourage you to tick off the items on your list as well as allowing you to have separate lists for different topics, using reminders, allowing for priorities etc. I'll be looking for an all-round replacement that can offer all this (and more?)
Since the only feedback I received from yesterday's post was to give Google Calendar another try, I am currently in the process of moving over some of my appointments and to-do's for a trial run of the app over the weekend. It's good to see they have a to-do list attached to the calendar, but once again, it just looks very plain and boring with no extra functionality.
Does anyone remember when Google was hip? Do they only programme bare-bones apps with no design, extra functionality or creativity? Yikes, using their software is a yawn-fest.
Anyway I'll see how the trial goes and search for and test out some more to-do apps as well, so I can offer a comparison for some of the android-to-mac options out there.
