To be productive without having a clue

How to process projects when you are a Dinosaur

If you want to be more productive
your must spend more time doing and less time processing and organising (Carl Pullein)

I am one of those guys who get stuck in the todo-app, watching the list of uncompleted tasks growing into a size where you just give up, have a cup of coffee, move everything around to another day and then play some computer game instead.

Why are we like that?
Well, in my case I think it has to do with my age. I got my first full time office job in the early 1980-ies. Yes, THAT is how old I am. In those days there were no digital calendars, notebooks or todo lists. I used a Filofax as calendar. There I put all my appointments, some short notes to every meeting or task I had scheduled in it. (Filofax, for those of you who are younger than us dinosaurs, was more or less the Rolls Royce of pocket calendars). I also had a small black notebook and a pencil. There I put notes from meetings, phonecalls and other stuff that I had to remember but that had not to be done on a fixed date. And in the Filofax I could also make a note to check my notebook. Every ongoing project had a checklist in the notebook.

When I started to work at the Swedish parliament in the early 2000-s, we had pagers in the first years, before we…