It’s been nearly a year that I haven’t written anything here. The power of procrastination is terrible. Well, it is not only procrastination. Or procrastination with excuse. I use a todo app to keep tracks of my tasks, and I’ve been keeping on postponing this Write-something-on-my-blog-todo as I couldn’t quickly see a nice topic to write about. Let’s be honest, I probably haven’t tried that hard neither.
Nevertheless, I had a deep introspective evaluation in the last weeks. The main conclusion I came to is that the last months have all been about transition. Transition to a new place, transition to a new kind of life, transition to a new organisation (still to find and optimise), and transition to new jobs.
The “problem” is that I essentially am a mono-tasking person, and get my mind easily cluttered by todos till I achieve them (even if they are properly scheduled to their due-date). As a consequence, I was constantly called by each of these transition things, to deal with them, but never really get to the bottom of any of them. I decided to take action.
I consider myself lucky as positive reinforcement methods work pretty well on me. For instance, by congratulating me, my Apple Watch motivates me to be active every day. I do much more sport than at younger age, and feel the benefit! My todo-app (Things) uses the same trick: achieving tasks is an objective to reach at the end of the day, and I get congratulated for it 🙂 I integrated this todo management long-ago in my workflow, but I overlooked it in the last months. My goal therefore is to pay a closer attention to my todos and to stop postponing them.
Tasks are a thing, but in my workflow I also have to deal with many notes, ie things I write down for later, but which are not strictly speaking todos. In the last years, I’ve tried Evernote, then OneNote, and finally sticked to Notes (on Apple devices) for it is easily synced through my devices. I’ve never felt satisfied by any of them. I am currently trying Agenda. I’ve heard a lot about this new application and people are quite enthusiastic about it. The point of Agenda is that sometimes notes are not just only notes, but also need to be scheduled. I wondered if it’s not redundant with a todo list, but I don’t think so. Yet I organised my notes just as my todos: with many projects divided in two domains, ie personal and professional. Let’s see how it works in the long term, but I already find some satisfaction in it 🙂
As tangible consequence to this new organisation, I aim at reclaiming a regularity here. I created a new Twitter account that I’m going to use for professional matters, and I linked this blog to it using IFTTT: each article posted here will be advertised on my Twitter account. Don’t forget the RSS feed if you feel more comfortable with this option 😉
The next steps is to update my CV and my ResearchGate and LinkedIn profiles. Let’s save a todo for this! So wish me luck, and don’t hesitate to comment, that will motivate me! 😀
