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🗓️ Weekly Reset #5 — Aged Tasks
👋 Hey there,
I hope you had a great week. Let’s get this week started with a quote.
📝 Quote of the Week
One of the quiet stressors of modern task management is your aged tasks. The digital nature of our lives makes it easy to add something to the list – yet never act upon it. So here’s an easy antidote:
• Go into your task list and sort by incomplete, **oldest first**
• Look at the dates, yes there’s going to be some old stuff in there
• Create a rule (i.e. “If it’s been there for more than 3 months, delete”)
— Khe Hy
🗝️ Key Idea
For me, there's something that feels inherently bad about mass-deleting tasks (at least without looking at them), so I propose a slightly different approach at curing the symptom of task overwhelm. Instead, we should move these tasks to a Someday Backlog. This will give us the benefits of “Out of sight, out of mind,” and then we can revisit that backlog with an appropriate frequency (Perhaps once a quarter or twice a year). I’ve been doing this for a few years now and it always feels good to see how many of those tasks I’ve already taken care of or are no longer relevant. Enjoy the increased focus.
A challenge for you: Take five minutes and go through your current todo list and see how many of these things aren’t urgent and are pulling focus from the main thing you should be working towards. Move them to a Someday Backlog.
🪄 Tool of the Week: One Thing
Task overwhelm is very real and one of the things I found helps with this is setting a Daily Highlight. A Daily Highlight is something that if you completed today you would consider today a success. A great companion to this strategy is a tool called One Thing, which is a free Mac toolbar app that will let you enter that one Daily Highlight and then continue to see it in your Mac toolbar so that you can stay focused on it.
One more challenge for you: I’ve been in the process of updating my website, brandonkboswell.com. Can you go take a look and give me your feedback on it? I would love to know what you like, but more importantly what you don’t like, and how it can be improved. I promise you won’t hurt my feelings. Feel free to reply directly to this email.
Have a great week!
Brandon Boswell
Looking to improve your focus & creativity?
Brandon Boswell
Subscribe to 🔎 Finding Focus, an email newsletter, where I share with you my reflections from the past week to give you one thought, tip and tool to improve your focus and creativity.
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