Managing Life and Preventing Crack-Fallers
I’m Brandon, one of the co-founders of Ativiti. This is my first post, so I’m going to lay out my life’s constant struggle that Ativiti will finally resolve.
I am an information analyst and manager at a $250M dot com in New York. I’m at the office 50 to 70 hours a week providing information to senior executives, training fellow analysts, and developing new technologies to make information more available to anyone who can utilize it.
In New York City, as with many other cities in the world, there are things to do 24×7x52. There’s work, there’s play, there are extra-curricular projects (mine is Ativiti)… the list of things to do seems to get longer each day.
SUNDAY:
- Go to the gym.
- Get the groceries.
- Errands with Izabella (buy potting soil, pick up repaired shoes, Paragon warehouse sale).
- Meet with Ativiti team.
- Season premier of Entourage at 10pm.
MONDAY:
- Weekly reports.
- Daily reports.
- Outline this week’s to-dos.
- Follow up on tasks colleagues own that are in critical path for my work.
- Buy flowers for Izabella (apology for coming home late).
- Add a blog post to Ativiti.
The list keeps going and growing. That’s just the “regular” to-dos; then there are the spontaneous ones that pop into your head out of nowhere when you’re out and about or talking with friends:
- Look up tickets for the 2010 winter Olympics in BC.
- Buy Izabella a new laundry basket.
- Pick up an HDMI cord.
- Pull a new sales variance report together to demonstrate the effects of the new quality ratings system on consumer behavior.
Last week I counted the things I wanted to do: 101. Then I counted the things I remembered to do: 79.
Things that aren’t top priority end up falling through the cracks. Some get overlooked for weeks until they become top priority. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’d done that three weeks ago?
Some crack-fallers never get attended to at all. Many people will brush this off and say “it just wasn’t important enough.” I consider a crack-faller to be a missed opportunity, the result of an inefficiency in our ability to manage life.
- Maybe the first step to accomplishing this task wasn’t intuitive to me. Intimidated by my lack of a starting point, I put it on the back-burner (where it stayed).
- Maybe the iPhone note to which I added this task was ignored thereafter.
- Maybe it didn’t come up in conversation for the next two weeks, so it didn’t get ingrained in my mind.
With Ativiti, you can catch these things, learn how to do them, track them, and get them all done.