Help With ADD ADHD From Technology— ADD Tip O the Day 625

Technologically Challenged

As most of you know, I am technologically challenged.  Therefore I’m very pleased to have this guest blog from Jerry Bair.  Please comment on your experience with using his tech recommendations or any others.

doug

One Super Easy Tech Trick To Make Your To-Do Lists More Doable

Have you ever stared at a to-do list not knowing how you or when you were going to fit everything into your already-chaotic schedule? Are you burned out by constantly switching between your calendars, tasks, and to-do lists?

I’ll admit… Over the last six months, I’ve taken off a bit more than I can chew. I was really ambitious and took on several new adventures in my life, like martial arts, finishing my degree, and a revamp of my blog.

I felt confident that I could do it all, but quickly ran into some technical challenges – to-do lists in too many places, multiple calendars, missed meetings, tasks that seemed to disappear into a black hole… As a result, I was frequently stressed, irritable, and felt like I was always playing “catch-up”…

It’s no surprise. Having ADHD, I sometimes tend to be “too” positive and underestimate the amount of involvement or work required for new initiatives. However, being a techy, challenges like these often inspire me with ideas for potential solutions. With this particular problem, I realized I was racking up my to-do list, but not scheduling a time to do many of the tasks, which created tons of schedule conflicts and many things not even getting done. My most productive days, like most people, are when I create a task, and slot it to get done. This was an essential insight to the solution below.

My top time & task managers:
• Wunderlist – to-do list manager supported on multiple platforms   Wunderlist
• Google Calendar – my preferred calendar on-the-go  Google Calendar
• MS Outlook – my desktop calendar at work and home (synchronized with GCal)  GCal       MS Outlook

Keeping up with these seems like it would be pretty simple, but like any technology, when you focus too much on one, you tend to neglect the other. My solution: Send my Wunderlist tasks to my Google Calendar. I already have my Google Calendar visible within Outlook, so this step would essentially unify them. In short, it would let me see all to-do’s, tasks, and meetings in one single calendar view.

The benefits of this:
• instant visibility to important tasks
• easier planning at the start of your day
• a consistent view across all your personal and mobile devices
• faster prioritization of upcoming tasks and meetings

I do realize that there are some people who have twice the number of calendar feeds as I do, and therefore, may use a different approach to their workflow. However, if you’re looking for a way to bridge the gap, look no further!

Here is the specific link to synchronizing Wunderlist with Google Calendar, Outlook and/or iCal: link[Estimated time to complete: <5 minutes]

Important Note: As of June 2nd, 2015, Wunderlist has joined the Microsoft family, so expect to see a lot more functionality and feature integration in the near future!

What type of time and task management tools do you use? How do you bridge the gap and stay on top of both your meetings and to-do’s?

If you have trouble with procrastination, follow-through, or even basic time management, download the free Breaking Through Procrastination Workbook at jj-bair.com.

Comment;

I hope you liked this and will comment. @addstrategies  @dougmkpdp  #add #adhd

doug                    

Another gift moment from ADD ADHD