Very many people, myself included (until recently), use task management systems to keep long lists of things they should be doing to make the most progress towards their goals.
Through my own experimentation, I’m now claiming that task management systems aren’t the right solution for most online creators/solopreneurs.
The real solution?
Idea capture systems.
In this article, I’m talking about how capturing ideas and neglecting to capture and organise tasks brought more clarity, better prioritisation and a greater creative output to my day’s work.
Let’s get started…
The difference between tasks and ideas:
Ideas are seeds, things that can flourish into beautiful creations if you give them enough time and attention.
Tasks on the other hand are leeches — they suck the time out of your day that you could be using to focus on growing your ideas into content.
Capturing tasks merely provides you with a list of ever more pointless actions that you could be taking, but very likely don’t need to.
“Oh, but if you don’t write down your tasks, won’t you forget them?”
Yes!
Most tasks that cluttered up my task lists were woefully irrelevant to what I was looking to create at the present moment. The priority of the creator…is to create, not to execute tasks.
They simply acted as hooks to draw my attention away from the task at hand, which was simply to outline or write, more often than not.
By failing to record them, these tasks took up no space in my attention, because I wasn’t aware that they existed.
This is why I say that this productivity method is most beneficial for the creators — you don’t have someone telling you what to do with your day, so you have the freedom to pursue what you like.
Unfortunately, the lack of structure of this time, and lack of clarity on what should be done during it (often caused by overflowing task lists), means you become distracted very easily.
By managing ideas only, your mind is automatically geared towards executing these ideas, turning them into content.
This, as creators, is ideal.
By filtering ideas from the tasks at the capture stage, you’re automatically prioritising the most important thing for creators. Looking at productivity rules like the Pareto Principle, it’s clear that this is an effective step towards only executing the most effective 20% of actions within your work.
So how do you capture ideas?
It’s very similar to capturing tasks — the important part of the process is recognising whether something’s an idea or a task.
Now, this sounds like it’s quite easy to do, but sometimes a task can disguise itself as an idea in your head. An example from my own system: ‘Create a Calendly page’ — I had the idea to create a page on Calendly, but in fact, this is a task because it’s something that will take time away from creating, and it’s not exactly relevant until I start booking calls with people (soon!).
Good ideas are a few words to a sentence long, and they provoke your mind into generating thoughts related to a piece of content that you could produce.
Capturing them is no complicated affair, you merely need some kind of inbox in places where these ideas arise, whether it’s on the road, in the shower or lying in bed.
For me, this is Todoist as a digital inbox, a notepad next to the bed and a whiteboard in the shower. It doesn’t have to be complicated — it has to be frictionless, or you won’t bother capturing ideas, let alone tasks.
At the end of each day, or perhaps less or more frequently dependent upon the number of ideas you’re generating, clarify the inboxes (like in GTD) and capture all the best ideas into a central location, from which you can select one and work on it when it’s time to create.
The process is simple so that we can focus on outlining, writing and publishing.
These are the priority actions in the creator’s arsenal, and we don’t want to take away any time from doing them by having an over-complicated organisation and planning system.
I hope you’ve learned something from this walkthrough of why I believe that task management is overrated for creators. I believe that it’s a good thing for other forms of work, where you have a lot of responsibilities, but for someone whose focus is creating, the tasks you capture often eat into attention and time that could be put to better use.