Strategy for Making Life Easier: Asana and the Mini Flex System

bykvertner

539 followers

8 years ago

Having been a project manager for the majority of my career, I can attest to the importance of managing your time. Most of my experience has been on multi-million dollar hardware and software projects, with teams dispersed around the world. With so many moving parts, lots of folks involve at different levels, it was very easy to get distracted by things that didn't matter....or fail to delegate when a "pressing" task really didn't need my attention.

If you think about it, there really are so many things, big and small, in each and every single day that we are presented with. It can be overwhelming. If we paid attention to every single one of them, they would slowly drive us insane.

Over the years, I found that if I had a system to track my task and delegate as needed, I could be a lot more productive. (I also found great personal satisfaction in "checking off" a completed task and then looking back at the end of the day to see that, yes indeed, I did get some work done today.) One of the tools I found early on, and fell in love with was Asana.

I'm not going to go into the details of Asana and why you should be using it. (You should be using it!) Toekzie123 has already done this in her blog post https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/toekzie123/blog/6-reasons-why-everyone-should-use-asana#

I highly recommend you head over there and check it out. In a nutshell, Asana is a free online tool that allows you to manage project/tasks from anywhere you have access to the Internet.

Asana has been great and served me very well...but I still found that I was loading myself down with tasks. And despite getting a lot of task completed, my sense of accomplishment at the end of the day was waning. I also found that Asana was only helping me with my work tasks. I hadn't integrated the rest of my life into the tool. At the end of the day it wasn't helping me form good habits or focus on non-work related tasks. All the things that I should be doing every day to keep a healthy balance (like reading a good book, meditating, stretching and day dreaming) were no where to be found in Asana.

After searching around the internet I found a solution, that for the last two months, has worked out really well for me. This solution is called the Mini Flex System, and has the following qualities:

• Simple
• Empowering (and never defeating, like when you don’t complete items on your to-do list)
• Flexible
• Easy to do
• Fun
• Clear
• Intention-generating

You can read the more about this solution here: https://medium.com/the-mission...

Instead of using a whiteboard, I use Asana to keep track of my Frequent, Now, Near Future and Someday tasks. I created a custom calendar (https://www.timeanddate.com/ca...) which I printed out and taped to the inside of a spiral notebook used for collecting my thoughts throughout the day.

After using this system for a couple of months, I feel more accomplished and confident that the work I need to do is getting done. And that I am also getting personal growth items checked off as well. By looking at my grade for each day, I can see trends in my behavior...am I getting better this week or doing worse? I can then make course corrections as needed.

Anyway, I hope you found this useful. I recommend you take the time to visit Toekie123's blog post and the article on the Mini Flex System. If anyone tries out the system I would love to hear how it is working out for you and if you maybe have some improvements to share!