My brain is like a suitcase (a very old, beat-up one) that will only hold so much stuff. I cram and cram until not one more thing will fit. We know what happens to suitcases that are too full… all the stuff in there gets mooshed (yes, that’s a Shelley word) around and it takes forever to find that one thing that you put on top that’s now SOMEWHERE in there… probably near the bottom. So, I try to get EVERYTHING I can out of there, in order to leave room for all the stuff I DO need quick access to. So what do I do with everything that that won’t fit in my brain suitcase?
I order my lists into categories — ‘Do Now‘ (today to 1 week), ‘Focus Projects‘ (multiple action step items — 2 weeks to a month from today), and ‘On Radar‘ (things that I want to do within a year) — and keep them in electronic project files along with ideas I find really cool, things I just want to remember, things I hear about I don’t want to forget, dreams, goals, and a bajillion other things. My lists are what keep me going. They are the way I cope with prioritizing tasks.
So what do you do? What do your priority processes look like? Am I am alone in my list obsession? (Sort of like the lonely telephone pole in the photo below…)