The recurring tasks list

About a month ago, I wrote this article about how to get all the chaotic time sucks running your life in order. I highly recommend you read it first and do the things it asks of you, especially if you’re like me and want your art to be your career. There are no shortcuts to making this happen, you have to put in the work. #sorrynotsorry

Ok, if you haven’t read that other article, you’ll probably still read this one because you’re human and humans love to cheat. Hopefully, however, you actually did take a couple of weeks to generate a big, scary list of the chaos and time sucks so that this article isn’t just eyeball masturbation. I mean seriously, reading about doing something isn’t’ the same as doing the thing.

Enter the list

It’s time to make a new list (the Recurring Tasks List) using part of the main one (The Chaos List). To do that, find all the items where you did a thing more than once, you should have some counting hash marks next to those items. Write down each of those things on this new list. Don’t worry, the order is not important. In parentheses after the task name, write the number of times you did this over the course of making your chaos list. Alos be sure to write down the interval for each task if you know it. (e.g. “bookkeeping (2, Sunday morning both times)” or “post to Facebook (15, every morning)” )

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As you look over this list, you’ll probably start to see some patterns, which is awesome. Patterns of recurring tasks = a scheduled task = a calendar item = more order and less chaos

So do that. Grab a calendar and plug those repeating items onto it, whether daily, weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, every Mon-Wed-Fri, whatever. Look at that! That start of a schedule that you can refer to when you get side-tracked, so you can get back on track. It’ll make you more productive and more creative; you spend less time worrying about what you’re supposed to do and when because you have this system to build your calendar, that frees up your brain to do the work it’s designed to do, namely generate new stuff.

Any questions about this, need more detail? Let me know in the comments or contact me.