In my last post I explained how to use the management tool Remember the Milk and how its important to write down everything you need to do. In this post I’m going to explain how you can take things further, and programme into your routine regular tasks which ensure mundane but essential stuff like cleaning and bill paying gets taken care of. Once again, I’ll explain how you can use Remember The Milk to manage this, but you can easily substitute in another system.

The problem - You never remember (or find time) to do chores

Chores are boring, but essential. If you don’t clear out your desk of papers once a week, pay the bills, hoover every now and again, run some virus checks on your PC and do the other mundane things in life you’ll end up with a messy desk, a dirty working environment, nowhere to live and a virus ridden PC. You won’t be able to work as effectively and your mind will probably feel cluttered as well. Up until recently I had this problem, and whilst I sort of kept on top of things, I was always concerned that there was something I should have been doing, and that made me more stressed.

The solution - set up each chore as a recurring task

When you see a chore that needs to be done, e.g. checking your bank account online, changing the bed, or just doing laundry, think about how often you need to do it. Is it weekly, monthly, every 2 weeks? When you’ve decided, set up the task in your preferred system and set it to repeat on the time scale you’ve chosen.

Setting up the tasks in Remember the Milk

I use Remember The Milk to do this, since I find their feature “repeat after” incredibly useful. What “repeat after” does is ensures the repeat time only kicks in once you’ve marked a task as completed. So if you want to change the bed every two weeks, and are then 4 days late in changing it, once you’ve marked it as completed it will be a full 14 days before you’re reminded again, rather than 10.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Set up the task as a normal task
2. Edit the task and under the “Repeat” option type in how often you want the task to repeat. You might want to consult their syntax guide, but you won’t go far wrong with “After a week” or “After 14 days” etc.
3. If you want something to repeat regardless of when you complete the task (could be useful with bills, if your late one month you don’t want to be late every month) make sure you omit the “after” keyword
   

Handy hints for managing your regular tasks

Don’t do tasks unnecessarily often

I used to check my bank account for false transactions every week, but I realised that once a fortnight was ample. It a waste of your time if you find yourself doing something too regularly. Think about each task and ask yourself if its really important than it be done this often. If not, alter the time scale and postpone the task.

Don’t be tempted to leave tasks out of the list just because someone else might do it

For a long time I didn’t bother putting cleaning the bathroom down as a regular task. I share a house so there’s other people to do this stuff too. Problem was, nobody else remembered either. Now the task is in there, and I check to see if anyone else has done it. If not, I’ll do it, or ask someone to do it, if they have I just mark it as complete.

Don’t be a slave to your chores

Most of my cleaning is set to recur every Thursday, but if I’m going out on Thursday there’s nothing wrong with doing it the day before or the day after. What you’ve got now is a reminder, not a rule.

Isn’t all this overkill?

Well yes and no. If you manage to take care of all these tasks by yourself, then your probably so well organised you don’t need such a system - your already doing all this by yourself.

I’m not well organised though, so I either do something too often because I’m not sure when I last did it, or completely forget to do certain things. This system takes the stress out of regular chores, it ensures nothing gets forgotten, and that lets me relax and stop worrying about what I should be doing. I program everything in, and once its done, I forget about that task for good. I just do it automatically, when I’m told. Its been the single best system I’ve introduced ever.

That’s it for this months advice, next month I’ll explain how I minimise information overload.

photo credit: Frenkieb