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The GTD-o-sphere has been buzzing lately with posts about how to capture, plan, track, and display Projects and Next Actions. The ideas range from simple lists to hPDA templates to Circa-fied inserts to your organizer. Take a look at these mini card post-its from 3M:

Simple, yet powerful, these cards let you think in a dynamic, visual way that creates connections and possibilities.

They stick to vertical surfaces, not each other, so they’re just as easy to organize in your hand as they are to display. These sortable cards also easily sort and shuffle, so you can organize them in your hand and on the go!

Use the handy headers to categorize information by topic, difficulty, priority or deadline. And with several sizes and colors to choose from, Sortable Cards make it more convenient than ever to organize your important thoughts, lists and tasks.

These little cards (2-7/8″ x 3-7/8″) are just the right size for the notes that you may need for a small project or listing your Next Actions. There is a colored border at the top with two spaces for writing, with lines beneath. The back of the card is also lined and has a marvelous Post-it adhesive strip. The adhesive is bounded by two plastic “stripes” at the top and bottom. This is the feature that makes these note cards so remarkable, as it keeps the cards from sticking to each other. This way you can sort and stack the cards just like your beloved 3″x5″ cards, yet the card can be stuck into your planner or where-ever you would stick a Post-it note.

But what precisely should you use them for? Well Corrie had an idea and made her own:

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been keeping track of my various “projects I’m working on” in the extra margin space of my weekly planner sheets (in the photo above, it’s the space between the day-boxes and the binder rings, under the cards). However, I found myself copying over unfinished projects from week to week. This got annoying.

I thought about Getting Things Done and began to see the wisdom of having a master “project list,” which was essentially what my week-to-week list was. So, I tried using a paper “bookmark” (about the width of the margin) as a project list-keeper. That worked okay, but I found myself having to look up other pieces of paper, emails, and online to-do lists related to each project.
This is about when I started scheming a cooler way to keep track of my projects AND some of the critical to-do’s for each project.

Here is a pic of what Corrie created:

Now there is a very good idea. But my projects aren’t really like that, nor do the lists of Next Actions fit on little cards like that. What I do like is the idea of the Most Important Task, from Leo at ZenHabits:

Three MITs. Here’s your planning system each day: write down your three Most Important Tasks on a sheet of paper (I write mine in a Moleskine pocket notebook). That’s it. Check off those tasks when you finish them. Devote your entire day, if possible, to those three tasks, or at the very least devote the first half of your day to them. Your MITs are basically the Big Rocks you planned for this week, and any other MIT that you need to do for today.

The new calendar pages that I am designing include a section for Big Rock planning. The mini-cards can be Circa-punched and kept in your organizer for more detailed notes on these tasks. This set of cards with the MIT becomes your “script” for the day, in fact that’s exactly what they call it at Micropersuasion:

Scripting was pioneered by legendary San Francisco 49er’s coach Bill Walsh during the team’s Super Bowl streak in the 1980s. It’s now utilized by many NFL coaches who run the West Coast Offense.

Rather than plot out the offensive plan for an entire game game, these men “script” out just the first 15 plays - and then they stick with them no matter what. It’s grown more complex too as coaches prepare themselves for different situations.

At its purest, scripting helps teams know their initial plays inside and out. This minimizes mistakes, establishes momentum and dictates the flow of the game. It also gives the coaching staff an opportunity to run “test plays” that are designed to generate a reaction from the competition - e.g. the defense. They observe their opponent’s tendencies - and then exploit them.

Football of course isn’t business. However, there are parallels. I am not advocating the abolishment of planning. It certainly has its place. Still, nimbleness matters today and by scripting, learning and adapting, you can succeed more quickly.

That post pointed me to this article at Fortune about Marissa Mayer (VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google) and how she schedules her day:

To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there’s a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they’re working on or what I expect from them. It’s just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: “These are the five high-priority things to focus on.” But at Google things can change pretty fast. This morning I had my list of what I thought I was going to do today, but now I’m doing entirely different things.

So I bought a pack of these cards (very inexpensive at $0.90 for 80 cards) and punched them with my Circa punch. Each evening I will jot down what my Important Tasks are for the next day on one of the 3″x5″ cards I keep by the bed. Then, in the morning, when I am plotting my plan for the day, I will transfer the Most Important Tasks to these little cards and stick them into my organizer at the front of the Next Action section. By the way, if you have downloaded the Beta calendar pages, I would like to get your feedback on how you are using them and suggestions on making them better. This project is getting larger than I ever thought it would.

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