I haven’t been blogging the A to Z Challenge these past few days because they were blocking me from getting the necessary things done—namely writing my novel, editing Kate’s novels, and preparing books for publishing (and other life obligations). I’ve been blogging for well over a decade, and love it. I’m not stopping blogging altogether. It’s just that, given the day job, trying to wedge in the A to Z Challenge as well was turning out to be a burden....
Do you ever get hat hair? You know, what happens when you’ve been wearing a hat or visor and you take it off and your hair is all dented and messed up? I get hat brain. It comes from having to change hats so often during the work day. Designer hat. Project manager hat. CEO hat. Coder hat. Community member hat. Marketer hat. So many hats! And I have to wear many of them each and every day....
Task management can be a challenge](/blog/how-translate-new-years-resolutions-actions) if you have a lot of stuff going on. “Urgent” things are always distracting you: the phone rings, colleagues interrupt you, a client asks for help, emails, newsletters, snail mail, IMs, Tweets… You could be buzzing like a bee, getting a whole lot of things done, but not getting done the right things. I would love to be using a Franklin-Covey Planner program on my Mac, but they don’t make one for Mac....
So I’ve been playing with OmniFocus alpha to see if it can work for me as a personal productivity/task manager, but as I noted before, the system lacks a way to prioritize tasks. It seems rather obvious to me that you want to identify the important must-do items before you start filling in your day. I could spend all day answering the phone, reading and writing emails, catching up on my feeds, having meetings, doing conference calls … and not getting done the things that need to get done....