TasksOnSteroids - Newsfeed

Your wishes and goals – an assessment

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Have you ever considered not making New Year’s resolutions but instead making an evaluation of your wishes and goals?

Businesses make evaluations at least once a year in the form of annual financial statements, inventories, etc. Such assessments are meant to provide information as to whether the expected goals were reached and how business currently stands.

Making an evaluation each year is not just important for businesses but also offers benefits to you as an individual. You benefit from your personal annual evaluation for the following reasons, as examples:

You survey once again the successes achieved in the last year. This way you obtain confirmation that the efforts invested were worth it. This confirmation in turn spurs on new actions.

You will be reminded of the goals that you set for yourself last year and then forgot. Through this remembrance, you gain the chance to correct your course and to renew a goal on the agenda or, if the goal is no longer important, to remove it entirely.

An evaluation is also always a new beginning. Thus in the course of your personal annual evaluation you should also consider the goals and wishes that you are currently working on and will also work on in the next year.

You become aware of what direction you are moving in. What was important to me before? What do I want to achieve today? What are the goals that I have already been working on for years?

What is the status of your personal assessment?
In case you already have a list in which you have collected your goals and wishes, then you deserve congratulation. You are on the right course to reach your goals and fulfill your dreams. The New Year would be a good opportunity for you to go through your list again and bring it up to date.

If you have not yet collected your goals and wishes in writing, then you should use the New Year to start on that task. Did you know that the probability of reaching your goals rises significantly if you write them down? Click here to find out why!

In case you would now like to begin your own goal-planning or optimize your existing goal-planning, you should definitely check out CourseControl right away. CourseControl was specifically developed to give you optimal support in the maintenance and organization of your goals and wishes.

In addition, you can find some helpful tips for your goal-planning in the CourseControl introduction. You will learn, for example:

How you can figure out your life goals and put them on paper with little effort.

How you can pick goals that provide strong motivation and help you achieve seemingly unrealistic goals and dreams.

Stressed? Try these 3 tips!

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0100

Stress is unhealthy and should be avoided. Unfortunately, this is not always so easy. Periods full of events, such as the end of the year with its upcoming annual financial statements, preparations for Christmas, family celebrations and alike will quickly become stressful.

But with a few simple measures you will be able to brush off stress in the future.

Did you know that good stress also exists?
There are two types of stress: Eustress (= good, motivating stress) and distress (= bad, unhealthy stress).

Eustress shows up e.g. before a speech in front of a large audience or before a parachute jump. It is characterized by the fact that it is built up in a short time and ends with a certain event. Usually during this period, pleasure hormones will be discharged by the body, which will encourage us to set high standards, also for the future. Eustress drives us forward. It motivates us to set high standards again in the future. Eustress is not unhealthy and therefore must not be avoided.

Distress differs from Eustress in that it builds up over a longer period and there is no terminating event. Pressure always increases with time. Distress arises when, for example, one feels overwhelmed by his tasks, or also when there are no relaxation periods after strenuous work. Distress is unhealthy and should be avoided. If you want to know how to do this - just keep reading.

What can you do to avoid bad stress?

Capture tasks on paper
By writing them down, you don't need to remember them any more. By simply writing down tasks you can avoid stress. The subconscious is freed from the obligation of having to remember a task again and again. This way you will be automatically calm and better able to concentrate on the task which you are currently undertaking.

He who plans earlier is relaxed later
An early planning of upcoming tasks avoids stress. Therefore you should take the time to draw up a proper planning before work-intensive phases. This way you will have the big picture in view from the beginning. You will know what to do, the existing dependencies between tasks and when you need to start the individual activities.

Space for relaxation
Rushing from task to task generates stress. Therefore it is also important to occasionally take time to pursue activities which you find relaxing. However, if you are already completely immersed into stress, you tend to forget such relaxing activities quickly. A simple way to remain in balance is to also plan relaxing activities in the task schedule. This way you could take a pleasant walk, visit the gym or meditate briefly, even in stressful periods.

Tasks can be planned stress-free with LifeQuadrants. Using the time-management-matrix ensures that there will be no lack of obligations nor relaxing activities in your time management.

Two simple ways to abide more easily by your resolutions in the future

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 02:00:00 +0200

Resolutions are a bit tricky. The moment you make them you are all for it and want to abide by them and to thereby change your life in some way or another. But only a short time after that you’ve already forgotten about your resolutions. Eventually you remember and find excuses why you couldn’t manage to abide by them. Over the years even your motivation suffers from your inconsequence and you make less and less resolutions because you lose faith in abiding by them.

In this article I want to show you two ways which will help you to change your resolutions into habits and keep them up.

Use familiar activities
Let’s say you often suffer from heartburn and want to approach that problem with a good habit. Your plan is to shift your acid-base balance into the basic area with the help of alkaline salts (e.g. Arm & Hammer Baking Soda). To achieve this goal you should integrate alkaline salt into your daily routine somehow.

You could resolve drinking alkaline water every day after getting up, but as this new activity hasn’t been part of your daily routine yet, you would probably soon forget about it and thus face the initial problem anew.

A better solution is to integrate this new activity into your daily routine. You can, for example, replace your shower gel with the alkaline salt *. Now, every time you take a shower, you will remember to use the alkaline salt. It’s impossible to forget about your resolution from now on and the new habit can take a root in your life after only a short period of time.

The continuous reminder
Another option to get used to resolutions is the continuous reminder.

Losing bad habits is often difficult because we’ve got used to them over many years. The subconscious mind fights changes and tries to follow familiar paths. But this is the very mechanism we can derive benefit from so that we familiarize good behavioral patterns. You just have to repeat the designated action often enough to make it become your second nature.

For the time it takes you to internalize the new pattern you might use continuous reminders to help you.

If you want to work out twice a week in the future, for example, you could set a weekly alarm on your mobile phone for Mondays and Thursdays to remind you of your workout. The important thing is to accept every of these reminders as a personal commitment; after all it is not your goal to ignore those continuous reminders, is it?

If the aspired new habit is not temporarily limited, you can of course work with post-its which you place somewhere where you can often see them (e.g. your fridge or the frame of your computer screen). To be more effective you might, for example, write a post-it that says: “Remember Parkinson’s law” *². Every time you read that you can check whether you excess the time frame you allowed yourself to spend on your current task and thus can catch up on everything.

Did you know that TasksOnSteroids' LifeQuadrants makes it possible for you to set continuous reminders for your tasks which are automatically sent to you via e-mail at your favored time?

Furthermore TasksOnSteroids makes it possible for you to chart continuous reminders (namely digital post-its) for your new habits without any time frame. Just go to the maxims-section, activate the 'display' tick and chart as many reminders as you like. Every page view will show you one of your reminders randomly.

Let me give you some more advice on reasonable reminders:

“How much have I achieved during the last week?” If you ask yourself this question once a week, it helps you to become aware of your continuous success and your progress.

“What do I appreciate?” Answering this question from time to time makes you oblivious to all the good things there actually are in your life.

*Additional information on the topic of alkaline salt:
Alkaline salt is a brilliant natural skin-cleaning remedy that was already used in ancient Rome. Furthermore it is as well possible to control your acid-base balance by your skin absorbing the basic elements of the alkaline salt, as it is by drinking alkaline water. For further information read: Health by purification

*² Additional Information on Parkinson’s Law:
Parkinsons Law predicates that activities tend to utilize the time available fully. That’s why a seminar paper/ an assignment always takes a whole term and nevertheless is stressful in the end. For further information read: Parkinson's Law

How Traditional Task Management Kills Your Work/Life Balance

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:00:00 +0200

"I'll do it, when I have time..."

To be honest, we all throw this sentence around casually. But did you know that this sentence is an indicator of a bad Work/Life-Balance? The problem with "not having any time right now" is that important tasks get ousted by more urgent ones.

Example:
You go into the office on Sunday to take care of a few tasks that need to be finished by Monday. As a result, the trip to the zoo you had planned with the kids gets canceled. Even if the tasks that need to be completed are not actually important, they create an urgency to be finished due to the deadline. The plans are moved because it is easier to tell the children that you do not have time, rather than having to explain to your boss that you missed a deadline.

Another Example:
The planned and important Internet research for the upcoming article is set aside in favor of the overdue, albeit relatively unimportant, planning for the next association party.

In the examples shown, each urgent task was preferred only because it included the pressure of a deadline. The importance of the task became lost. This same mechanism leads to more urgent tasks (no matter how important they really are) to be pushed to the front of the queue, and the more important ones to be put on the back-burner.

Duties in personal life that are most important to you and offer more in the long term, unfortunately, do not carry a (binding) deadline. Here would be, for example, the already-mentioned family outing or energy-recharging by partaking in hobbies. Private commitments are usually willingly pushed off because they lack a binding deadline.

The Root of the Problem
Traditional task management supports this effect of "Priority Blindness." In traditional time oriented task management, tasks are measured primarily in terms of their deadline. The importance of the task is quickly overlooked, especially when another task's deadline threatens to become overdue.

Furthermore, traditional task management systems are mostly limited to the job, causing tasks in this field to be preferred. A task management system that balances work and life must also include all things in the realm of private life. Please, do not misunderstand! This does not mean that you should have to plan all of the future tasks that are going to happen in your life. You should, however, have the option to do so.

Is A Good Work/Life Balance Even Worth Striving For?
Think for a moment about how different your life would have been had you chosen the important things more often than having pursued quick payoffs. The result is clear: You would have wasted less time and been more successful with the bigger goals in life. And that is worth striving for, right?

The Solution
Organizing purely based on time/urgency does not seem to be the best approach if you want to keep your life balanced. To solve this problem, a task management system must be based on the task's urgency AND importance. For this exact reason, the Time Management Matrix (also known as "Two-Dimensional Task Plan") was developed. In the Time Management Matrix, tasks are placed in a coordinate system, like you learned in math. In this way, it is clear through just one glance how important and urgent a task is. Thereby, you can always tell the importance of a task and can decide objectively which task to tackle next.

If your interest has been aroused, learn more here, in detail, about how you can create your own two-dimensional task plan.

Two-Dimensional Task Planning - Importance vs. Urgency

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 02:00:00 +0200

What is Two-dimensional Task Planning?
Because traditional, linear task management systems only allow a temporal arrangement of tasks, they often lead one to prioritize urgent tasks over important tasks. That is due to the fact that the urgency of a task is often mixed up with the importance of a task. Humans just tend to want to take care of overdue tasks before it is too late to do so. They also accept that actual important tasks may be left undone because of that.

Two-dimensional task planning rectifies one of the main problems of linear task management schemes, that is, the lack of a reasonable means of prioritization. With two-dimensional task planning, tasks are not arranged in a row, but rather in a coordinate system, the same kind as is used in mathematics. Every task is assigned a priority and a date and time, and thus these two attributes can no longer accidentally be mixed up with each other. According to these two attributes, tasks are sorted into one of the quadrants of the coordinate system, where each of the quadrants has its own meaning for how these tasks are to be handled. The meaning of these quadrants will be elaborated upon in further detail later in this article.

What is Two-Dimensional Task Planning Needed For?
Improvement of One's Work-Life Balance
Two-dimensional task planning supports the development of a good work-life balance. Details may be found in this article.

Well-Suited for Creative Types
It has become evident that two-dimensional task planning is particularly well-suited for people who generally do not get along well with task management systems. Especially creative people often have trouble adhering to linear task management schemes, whereas the use of a two-dimensional task management system does not present as much of a problem to them. Read this article to find out why.

Improvement of Effectiveness
Because of the clear arrangement of tasks in two-dimensional task management systems, you can enhance your effectiveness considerably. Refer to this article to find out why.

How to Create a Two-Dimensional Task Schedule?
It is very easy to create a two-dimensional task schedule. All you need is a notepad, a pen, and a few post-it notes.

First, you draw two lines on a piece of paper; one lengthwise, and the other crosswise. The two lines split the sheet of paper in the middle, resulting in a coordinate system with four quadrants of equal size. Add a left-facing arrowhead to the horizontal line, and label it "Urgency". Draw an arrowhead that points upward on the vertical line, and label it "Importance".

Every new task is written on a post-it note, is assigned a priority and a date and time, and is posted into the coordinate system according to those values. Thus, tasks that are higher up are more important than ones further below. All tasks move from the right side over to the left side as time passes, due to their date and time value.

Meaning of the Quadrants

Tasks that are posted in the upper right are important and still on schedule. These tasks should receive preferred treatment, before they move into the upper left quadrant and become overdue. All of the things in our life that are, most of the time, not perceived as urgent (i.e., are not assigned a date and time), even though they are actually important to us (e.g., spending time with family, etc.), are in this quadrant.

All tasks in the upper left quadrant are already overdue, and important. These tasks have to be dealt with. However, one should not concentrate solely on these tasks, but rather find a healthy balance in dealing with tasks in the upper right and in the upper left. The main goal for this quadrant should be to reduce the amount of tasks contained and to keep it as small as possible, without neglecting the right quadrant.

Due to their unimportance, only little effort should be invested into dealing with tasks in the lower left quadrant. Whenever possible, these tasks should be delegated, i.e., assigned to other people.

In the lower right, time wasters are exposed. Normally, everything that ends up here can, after a brief inspection, be removed again straight away.

Software-based Support for Your Task Management
If you are looking for a comfortable solution for organizing your tasks according to the two-dimensional task scheduling principle, you should definitely check out LifeQuadrants. In addition to the normal set of features for two-dimensional task planning, LifeQuadrants supports many more that will help you reach your goals faster and improve your work-life balance at the same time.

Further Reading
Dr. Stephen Covey explains two-dimensional task planning in great detail in his book 'First Things First'.

How to double your effectiveness in a week

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 02:00:00 +0200

Where do you think you would be if you had always focused on the essential tasks? What goals would you have achieved if you had paid no attention to all those unnecessary, time-devouring tasks?

How much time would you have saved, which you would have been able to spend on more interesting things?

Getting rid of unimportant time wasters
A major problem leading to poor efficiency is the preoccupation with unimportant tasks that consume time without bringing us closer to our goals. Unfortunately, time wasters are usually not visible at first glance. But if you learn to identify those tasks, you can eradicate them quickly. By giving time wasters little to no attention, you automatically have more time for tasks that advance your other goals.

A good way to identify time wasters is provided by the time-management matrix. In this type of task management system, time-eaters are kept in a separate category (the lower right quadrant) and, thus, no longer get in the way of important tasks.

More motivation through a sense of achievement
The completion of unimportant tasks (yes, it's back to the aforementioned time-eater) is usually rather unsatisfactory, since it does not bring you closer to any of your goals. Focussing on important tasks, however, leads to the completion of goals and to the celebration of successes. Each completed important task, whether large or small, gives us the feeling that the effort expended on it was worth it as long as it actually brought us closer to a target. Precisely for this reason, important tasks also have a motivating effect, which incites additional acts, while time wasters pose a danger to motivation.

Additionally, important tasks are identified easily in a time-management matrix, since they also receive a separate category (the two upper quadrants).

Double effectiveness
You can now increase your own effectiveness by the very fact that you have prioritized important tasks over unimportant tasks, and their associated feelings of success will, in turn, motivate you to complete additional tasks. The same process also eliminates time-eaters, giving you even more time for the important things in life. In this way you can easily at least double your own effectiveness.

Try it once
For the change to the time-management matrix, no learning effort is needed. Try this type of task management system for just a week. Continue to simply use your old task management system during the transitional phase as you add new tasks to your time-management matrix. You will see how the time-management matrix facilitates the selection of essential tasks and how your motivation and effectiveness will be increased.

You can find additional information on how to create your own time-management matrix here.

Next generation task management with LifeQuadrants
TasksOnSteroids LifeQuadrants offers a convenient way to use a time-management matrix for task management.

Agile task management for creative people

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 02:00:00 +0200

In the human brain the right hemisphere is responsible for activities like musicality, creativity and spatial powers of imagination and the left hemisphere controls functions like logical and analytical thinking. But most people do not use both hemispheres to the same extent. Creative people, people who, for example, are quicker with the capture and production of graphical content tend to have a more well-developed right hemisphere. However, mathematically gifted people use their left hemisphere more frequently.

The classical task management systems, in which tasks are showed in linear form, lined up deadline by deadline, are hardly manageable for creative people. Moreover, such systems restrict the creativity and often lead, therefore, to the fact that creatively inclined people lose interest in such systems after a short time. In addition, missing the opportunity to let one's own creativity run free in the management of tasks often leads to unnecessary stress situations for creative people if they try to squeeze their tasks into such a defined system because it contradicts their nature.

The solution: agile task management with the time management matrix.
The time management matrix was used by former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and later optimized by efficiency expert Dr. Stephen R. Covey. Within the time management matrix, tasks are organized using "deadline" and "importance" as criteria.

How you can establish your own task planning according to this principle is described in the article "Two-Dimensional Task Planning - Importance vs. Urgency".

TasksOnSteroids offers you with LifeQuadrants a convenient way to use the time management matrix. In LifeQuadrants all tasks are showed in a graphical system. LifeQuadrants forces no schedule upon the user and also does not prescribe which task has to be done when. Rather, LifeQuadrants leads the user in the direction aimed by him or her without losing sight of the 'big picture'.

LifeQuadrants helps you to distinguish important tasks from insignificant tasks and focuses your attention on the activities which help you. Because, if you want to get closer to your personal and professional goals, it is of essential importance to concentrate on the important tasks, and not to waste time with tasks that not only occupy you, but do not really help at all.

Best of all, why not try it immediately!

Planning for success: The advantage of writing down goals

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:00:00 +0200

Writing down your goals is extremely important and it has a significant impact on whether you will achieve a goal or not. If you are willing to do some extra work in planning your goals, you can also considerably increase the probability of achieving a goal.

The Dominican University of California conducted a study on this subject. This article gives attention to part of that study; the full study can be found here.

The study subjects were divided into five groups.

Group 1 thought about their own goals but did not write them down.

Group 2 recorded their goals in writing.

Group 3 recorded their goals in writing and also defined the first steps in order to achieve these goals.

Group 4 recorded their goals in writing, wrote down the first steps in order to achieve these goals and also informed a friend about them.

Group 5 wrote down their goals, defined the first steps, and agreed to give weekly updates to a friend about their progress.

The results of the study were that the subjects in Group 5 had achieved considerably more goals than all other groups (the success rate was almost twice as high as in Group 1). Each group had achieved a better result than the respective preceding group, the only exception being Group 3 (the first group which defined concrete steps to reach their goals), which was worse than Group 2 (more on that later).

Credit: http://www.dominican.edu/academics/ahss/psych/faculty/fulltime/gailmatthews/researchsummary2.pdf.

The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 shows that simply writing down the goals has a significant increase in the likelihood of success. For this reason, everyone should take the time to think through his or her goals carefully and to write them down.

The problem with Group 3: Why was there a decrease of achievements in Group 3? My interpretation of the poor performance of Group 3 is that the subjects had lost the perspective of the actual goals after the definition of the first steps and, therefore, achieved less than the previous group. But taking also Group 4 into consideration, it is however possible that this negative effect can be reversed by letting a friend know about the goal. Also it must not be overlooked that the results of Group 3 were still an improvement over those of Group 1. Therefore it is not advisable to skip planning the next steps towards achieving a goal, despite these somewhat poorer results.

The social obligation: Especially when comparing Groups 4 and 5 with the other groups, the effect of linking a personal goal to a social obligation is shown very nicely. A social link can be set, for example, by a bet, or, as shown in the study, by telling a supportive friend about the goal. The result is the same: an increased probability of success in achieving the objective. The secret behind this is that through such a social link there is a risk that other people might find out about your failures. To avoid this, you will automatically put more energy towards reaching the goal and, thus, increase the likelihood of succeeding. You can increase this effect even further by increasing the number of people you inform about the goal.

This study shows that there is definitely a big difference between simply thinking about a personal goal, and putting it on paper, and if necessary taking additional measures to increase the likelihood of success.

Another advantage of the written collection of goals must not be forgotten. By writing down a goal you are committed to it and take it on as such. Goals are this way perceived to be more concrete. Writing down a goal often has the consequence of that goal being immediately approached.

In order to support you in planning your individual goals, TasksOnSteroids offers the possibility of applying the aforementioned methods to achieve your objectives. With TasksOnSteroids you can plan your short-, medium-and long-term goals in writing, and to achieve an increase in the likelihood of success, you also have the option of introducing social obligation by publishing your goals at you own discretion.

The TasksOnSteroids team wishes you a great success in planning and achieving your goals.