Getting Your Priorities Straight

During a typical week, I’ll have at least two projects going on that are due in the next week or so. I always have a studio project for Architectural Design, and I’ll typically have some other project for another one of my classes, whether it’s the Faculty Interview Project for CLS105, or a case study for Structures I.

I’ll also have all of the smaller homework assignments throughout the week that need to get done sooner than the large projects. With so many assignments given every day, it can sometimes be hard to keep track of those larger projects, and consequently it’s easy to miss due dates, or get stuck with all of the work at the last minute.

To help me with managing all of my work, I’ve always liked creating to-do lists, and putting a big box next to each assignment that I can then check off. The simple act of making that fat check mark feels like an accomplishment. It’s good to have that feeling of accomplishment when you seemingly have an endless amount of work; it assures you that you are making progress.

Just recently, I've started using an app for my iPod called Toodledo. It’s essentially exactly what I’ve always done in an electronic format. This way, you can maintain your list and it will automatically organize itself. It will remove checked off tasks (or keep them there if you like to see the progress you've made), organize the list according to the priorities that you set for each task, categorize the tasks according to folders you assign them (such as which class they are for), and even remind you with an alarm of an approaching deadline.

When you create a task, you can give the task a brief title, assign it to a folder, give it a priority (-1 through 3), assign a due date and time, and give it a description. I like to keep things simple and organized, so I only have four folders: projects, homework, tasks, and leisure. Projects are the ongoing assignments that typically involve multiple deadlines and tasks that I need to get done, homework are the assignments that are given in my classes that are typically due the following class, tasks are important deadlines that are non-class related (such as payments) or other important non-school related tasks, and the leisure folder essentially contains all of the plans I make for myself such as dinner dates, television shows, or some other event for fun.

In order to specify certain assignments, I usually give them an acronym or a prefix. So for instance, all of the important tasks that I needed to get done for the Faculty Interview Project, I would put “FIP : ” before each one so it would read “FIP : transcribe interviews.” In this way, I could keep track of which tasks were for which classes/projects.

The nicest thing about this application is that not only does it help me prioritize and organize all of the assignments I have to get done in the coming weeks, but also that I can easily use it in conjunction with a number of other task management tools (I use it with Google Calendar a lot so that I can see what I need to get done and then plan a time to do it).