To Do Lists

At work I have a system for keeping myself organized.  The nature of my work often has me juggling several different projects that all have their own priorities and timelines.  In order to keep track of what I have to do I use Outlook.  It's a great system with built in tools that allow me to flag emails I need to follow up on but don't have time to do at the moment and set deadlines and reminders.  I can also add my own to-dos and all my emails and written to dos show up as little red flags in my task bar organized by due dates.  Some people don't like this system or have other ways of doing things, but it certainly works for me.  Keeps me on track and lets me prioritize things with built in reminders.  I find that most of the time as long as I keep up with my to dos and check things off the list and do a thorough review of what's on there to clean out things that are done but I forgot to check off at least once a week, it works great.

Sometimes though, when I get really busy, this list gets a little unwieldy.  Those days I move to my back up plan of keeping a pile of paper with notes from meetings, documents with stickies about what I need to do with them etc. in a pile or folder on my desk.  Stuff goes in here if it's notes from a meeting that lists things I need to do but haven't had time to add to my to-do list or things I need to make sure get done before I get back to tackling the electronic to-do list.  Even in the busy times, I normally only go a few days before I have a chance to sort through this pile of papers and complete things and/or add them to my electronic to-do list.

But every once in a while both of these systems get so overwhelmed that my task bar is a laundry list of items I don't even have the time to sort through and my desktop is cluttered with piles of papers because my one pile has now sprouted into several so that important items don't get buried in a mass of papers and forgotten.  It's on these days, like today, that I resort to the back-up to the back-up plan and use my notepad and paper to write myself a handwritten to-do list with boxes to place checkmarks that usually includes 2-5 items I have to get done first then a to-do to sort through my to-dos.  As I hit the end of my day today I decided I had to do this to organize myself to tackle my mess of work tomorrow, after listing several things I have to get done tomorrow, I ended up with three to-dos at the end of my handwritten list to
1. review my piles of meeting notes and documents to identify tasks to add to my to-do list
2. review my electronic to-do list to prioritize items
3. Start doing my to-do list

That's how crazy my work week has been.