I’ve seen quite a few Instagram reels about the kid who was supposed to take dinner out of the freezer to thaw out before their mom got home, but forgot. And then they panic when the door opens. They are humorous because it’s a situation that a lot of us have found ourselves in. Your sitting on the couch playing video games or watching mindless television and your parent has to leave. As they walk out the door they ask you to do something and you say yeah, yeah, yeah; almost annoyingly as they have interrupted your stream of unconsciousness. A few hours later your still sitting in that same spot and you hear the lock on the door turning, your stomach drops as you realize you never did what they asked you to do.
I was guilty of this way too often so my mom found a solution to put an end to it. When she left and there were chores for me to do, or if we were having people over and the house needed to be cleaned, she would make me a list. This had two advantages to it; first, there was no more forgetting what needed to be done and second, I got extreme satisfaction from crossing items off the list. Of course I still waited until the last possible minute to get it all done, but I it got done.
That practice has certainly carried over into my adult life as I now live by a list of tasks that need to be completed while at the office and I am more productive at home when I am utilize a to do list. I actually take this process to the extreme and don’t recommend my practices for anyone else, but it works for me. I put everything on the to do list. Turn off my alarm, on the to do list; get dressed, on the to do list; brush my teeth, on the to do list; and you get the idea. Do I need to put all of that on the to do list in order to get it done? No. Most of the generic stuff is habit, but there is a level of satisfaction when I see that to do list dwindling down all day long.
I have tired various methods for creating a to do list in my life. My mom kept it simple, she just wrote my chores down on a piece of paper, but that doesn’t work for me anymore due to the magnitude of my list and the time it would take to copy it for the following day. With that, I have cycled through a multitude of applications looking for the one that would perfectly suit my needs. I won’t name all of the ones I have tried, but most of them were all good; they just weren’t as robust as I wanted them to be. That is until I found OmniFocus.
OmniFocus allows me to create folders, projects and tags for the different areas of my life in which I can create tasks related to those area. The two features I appreciate the most in OmniFocus though are the user interface and the ability to set my tasks to recur at any frequency I can imagine. Daily, weekly, monthly tasks are easily to schedule and when I complete them I get to see that circle fill with a check mark and know that the task has already been scheduled to be completed again. Creating tasks is exciting because I know that I am going to get to check that box and because of that I know OmniFocus is going to be a huge part of my success here at DividuusOne and there won’t be anymore moments of panic as I suddenly remember that I forgot to take the food out of the freezer.
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