🔋 Back to Basics: Taking Notes & Taking Actions

I'm back. Let's start by getting back to basics, eh?

After hitting that milestone of 40 consecutive posts, I gave myself a break. I have so many ideas and partially written posts. I'm excited for this next season of the blog, staying focused on Three-Dimensional Productivity.

Taking Notes & Taking Action

One of the most common issues I hear from folks in the quest to be productive is losing track of action items. They write note after note and cast them into the sea of good intentions, closing their eyes and hoping that the relevant action items will somehow float to the surface instead of sinking to the depths.

But of course they don't. Keeping track of action items requires, well, action.

Here's my basic, four-part suggestion on what actions to take:

Write action items down

Avoid the trap of assuming you'll remember things!

Remove from your brain the burden of remembering. If something has to be recalled later, like a task you told someone you'd do, build a practice of writing it down in a consistent place that you can access easily.

Make action items stand out

Avoid the trap of assuming things that require action will stand out on their own!

Note-taking can take all kinds of forms. Whether you're jotting it all in an app on your phone, scrawling it down on paper, typing into your computer, or relying on dictation, the important thing is to be consistent so you know where to find what you wrote.

But not all notes are created equally. Some are just for context, some for background, and some for action. Mark those action items with a star, a highlight, or any marking of your choosing.

Review your notes, find action items, and add them to your to-do list

Avoid the trap of action items getting lost within other notes!

To make notes functional, you gotta look at them after you take them. A quick, daily review can surface those action items, which you can then extract from your notes and put into whatever program you use to track your to-dos. For me, that's Todoist.

Add a date and a priority for each task

Avoid the trap of losing your to-dos within your to-do manager!

By adding a due date (or an approximate one if you don't have a specific one), you know you'll see that to-do task again (as long as you regularly check the "today" view of your to-do manager). And priorities help you, well, prioritize.

Due dates for lower priority items can be flexible. For example, I have 17 tasks left on my to-do list today, and in all likelihood, a dozen of those will get rolled over to tomorrow. That's ok! So long as I got through the highest priority items, I'm perfectly comfortable not accomplishing the rest of them.

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There's much more to be said on each of these topics, as there are on other aspects of three-dimensional productivity. Thanks for joining me in this upcoming series.

If ya like what I write, share a post with a friend, will ya? I mean, who doesn't love being sent oddly personal reflections on productivity?

See y'all next week.

—Ryan

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