# This is why your task manager overwhelms you.

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Thomas Frank
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

About a year ago, I created a new daily planning system for myself that I've been using every single day since then. And it has worked wonders for me, especially in helping me to know exactly what I should work on next throughout the day. It's also convinced me that most people are doing daily planning wrong. But I don't think it's their fault. I think it's the fault of their tools. So, in this video, I want to quickly show you the system that I've created. It's called the My Day page here in Notion. but it really is just employing three small rules that you can actually use in any kind of productivity system. You don't have to be using Notion. So, I'm going to quickly show you this page, but then I want to have a little bit of a discussion on what I think is wrong with most people's daily planning process and the tools that they are using. So, this is the system I've created as a little bit of a preview. It's called my day and it has three specific sections. It's got one called plan. That's really just a sort of classic task manager showing me my due today view, my overdue view, everything else. But then I have a second section called execute. And when this section is populated, it is what shows me the tasks I'm actually going to work on. Finally, there is a wrap-up section that I'm going to explain a little bit later uh because the details of it aren't relevant right now. What I first want to talk about is the problem that I think a lot of people face with their daily planning workflow and the tools that they're currently using. And the problem is this. Most people use task managers and when they use task managers, they are encouraged heavily to apply a due date to every single task they create. So you might end up with something like this where we've got four tasks that are due today. There's an actual due date on them and this should be good enough, right? This should be the only view I need to plan my day. But in practice, and you've probably experienced this yourself, your due today view often doesn't look like this. it's not so clean. Your due today view usually ends up looking something like this after a while where in addition to the tasks that are actually due today, you've got all these overdue tasks. But here's the thing, most of these overdue tasks, if not all of them, were never actually due on these dates. These are fake due dates. And the reason that they're there in the first place is because the system encourages you to apply a due date to every single task that you enter. And because you would like to get these tasks done sooner rather than later, you apply a due date. But the problem is now you can't really tell the difference between tasks that you would just like to get done soon and tasks that actually have a deadline. And so you end up with this mess. And this mess is a problem because when you are starting your day and you're trying to lay out a plan for what you're going to accomplish, this is useless. You know, you could not get all of these tasks done and yet they're sitting here saying that they're due today. So, fix number one, and this is something you can apply in any task management system. Doesn't have to be Notion, doesn't even have to be computer-based, but keep deadlines sacred. Apply due dates only to tasks that actually have to be done by a specific date. Like if your boss says, "Hey, this needs to be done by Friday, otherwise you are canned. " Then that's going to be a task with a deadline, a due date. But other tasks don't need deadlines. They can be organized in other ways. And now I want to show you how I have fixed daily planning for myself. So I no longer have to deal with this, which is actually just a demo copy of my personal task manager that I'm not actually using. The new system I've built actually allows me to have something more like this where only tasks that are say actually due today like sending our Black Friday sales email uh or tasks that are say recurring tasks that need to be done on a schedule have due dates and everything else is simply in the system organized into projects or sitting in the inbox and it gets planned in a different way. And here's how. You will notice that in my little my day page here I have a view of my normal task manager. This is the task manager that I showed you how to build in my task manager tutorial. Um, and the page itself is in my ultimate brain template for notion. So, you can actually get this in the description down below if you just want it done for you. But you will notice that over here we have our typical status checkbox. I can check the task off if it's done. But then over here there's another checkbox called my day. And if I check this box, this task now shows up in this view called execute. So essentially the way in which I now plan my day is I just deliberately select the tasks that I'm going to work on by checking their little my day checkbox just like that and I populate this execute section right here. And once I'm done with my little 5m minute planning sprint in the morning, this is all I look at throughout the day. And to make things a bit more clear, I do want to explicitly mention because I don't think I did it before that when I'm going through the plan views here, I'm not just looking at the today view. This has the handful of tasks that have true deadlines, but during my planning sessions, I'm also looking through the other views of the task manager. Maybe something got brain dumped into the inbox. It's not processed yet, but I want to pick it up and work on it today. Or more

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

importantly, maybe I've got something in an active project that doesn't have a deadline applied, but that I still want to get done sooner rather than later. So, when I'm going through my planning process, I might come in here to see my active projects. This view only shows groups of project tasks that are inactive projects that I'm currently working on. And I might go um maybe I want to fix this date component in fly lighter. I've got some dev time today. I'll go ahead and add that to my plan. Now, you might be noticing a few additional bells and whistles here that aren't showing up here. We've got these tags. I'm going to cover those in a later section of the video because I have made two additional little upgrades to this uh section. One of which is called context tags and the other one is time tracking. But this is really the most important thing. Step one, I have reduced my reliance on due dates. So only tasks that actually have deadlines are showing up here. Step two, I'm creating a from scratch deliberately chosen list of tasks that I'm going to work on each day. And then while I'm working, this is all I look at. And you'll notice that there is no sort criteria inside this list at all. And that allows me to drag these tasks around. So while I'm doing my planning, I can create a rough order. And that essentially tells me exactly what I should work on. When I finish a task, well, the next one in the line is the one I need to work on, and I don't have to look at anything messy like this. Now, you might be asking, what happens if an unexpected task pops up during the day that would screw up this plan? And the answer to that is, well, if you're going to get that new task done, just add it here. So, for example, let's say that somebody adds a new GitHub issue that's really urgent for one of the automations that I've created. If I intend to do this, fix this issue today, then I'm just going to add fix GitHub issue right to my daily plan like that. And now it's part of the plan. And if I get it done, we're all good. If I don't get it done, at that point, I'm going to process it. So that's really step two in the process. Again, step one is reduce reliance on deadlines. Only use them where needed. Step two is to create a new list every single day, deliberately checking uh off these tasks. So you pick them, then you put them in this execute section. And then step three, which is really, really important, is you have to clear this list at the end of the day. And you got to do it even if you didn't get everything done. So let's say we did fix the GitHub issue. We put up the trash bin and we checked feedback, but we didn't get this sales email sent out and we didn't clear the emails and chats. You might be tempted to just leave the list as is and come back tomorrow morning to fix it. But you shouldn't do that. You really, really want to start from a blank slate every single morning. And that is the entire purpose of this wrap-up section down here. So, two parts to the wrap-up section. One, there is a button right here called clear my day, which when I click it, it will go ahead and uncheck the my day checkbox on any task where it's checked, clearing this back to its blank state. And then we have some other views down here. And the purpose of these other views is to reduce some anxiety that might come up in clearing this list. You see, right now you've got all the stuff that you were currently working on, the stuff that's sort of like loaded into RAM in your brain, uh, in one centralized spot. And if I clear the list, then some of them are going to go back to wherever they were. They're going to be findable in their projects, but they didn't have due dates, so they're not going to be on the due uh today list. Like, how am I going to find them? Well, that is the entire point of the wrap-up section. So basically what I've done here is I've created a single view called clear my day which has a filter that shows uh where my day is checked. So basically this is identical to this but it's a table view. So if I need to process a task that I added in the middle of the day like say fixing this GitHub issue I might want to put that in like my uh work ongoing project like that. I can do that. And that way before I click this button to clear my day, I can make sure that each one of these tasks has any needed details. Let's say that this was really urgent. It didn't get done today. Uh maybe it's so urgent that I actually do want to give it a due date. I can go ahead and do that while it's here in this sort of holding area. Once that's done, I'll hit clear my day. Hit continue. Now we are back to our blank state. Now I've added a couple of additional views here. One is a review calendar. This just shows any task that has an actual due date. I can sort of like prime my brain at the end of the day for what might be actually due, might actually have a deadline tomorrow. And then this may be most important for sort of calming that anxiety around tasks that I've cleared from my day. This plan tomorrow view is sorted by the edited date of my tasks in descending order. And when I click the clear my day button, that's going to make an edit to all those tasks that were in the execute view. They are going to have their my day checkbox unchecked. that counts as an edit, which means that all of them are right here at the top. So, once I've cleared the list, if I'm doing a little bit of pre-planning for tomorrow, I might go, we really need to

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

send that sales email. I'm going to go ahead and add it back and I really need to get my email cleared. I'm going to go ahead and add that back. And I've sort of prepopulated the list for tomorrow. I don't think it matters so much that you plan the night before or you plan in the morning right before work. But I do really think it matters that you start from a blank space and you deliberately select the tasks you're going to work on each day. That way you know what you committed to instead of again looking at something really unclear that just seems urgent like this. So now I want to show you two additional little upgrades that I made to my daily planner that go beyond that main concept. But before I do, I just want to reiterate everything I've shown you so far is not unique to Notion. In fact, you could do something as simple as looking at your regular task manager and writing the tasks that you're going to do today on a whiteboard or a sticky note. Really, the only important thing here is that you create a separate list that shows you only what you're going to work on today because work happens sequentially. And if you're not choosing a task and focusing on it, then you're really getting nothing done. And if you can't get that focus by looking at your big messy task manager, don't look at it. use it in the morning for planning or the night before, but then look at that small tight list of deliberately selected tasks. Okay, let's quickly look at some of the extra features that I added into this daily planning uh tool here. The first one are called context tags. And you can kind of see them right here. Send initial sales email has home, immersive, and high applied to it. So, if we open up this task as a full page and then I go ahead and open up our little side panel here, you can see that we've got them under this prioritization uh sidebar section. There's one called energy, there's one called PI, which I will explain in a second, and there's one called location. So, the point of tagging tasks with these context tags is number one to help you order them throughout the day, and number two, to help you batch similar tasks. For example, if I've got multiple tasks that need to be done instead of outside of the home, uh like out on an errand, I need to go buy dog food and I also need to go to the grocery store, I would want to get those done in a batch. And you might find it helpful to actually tag them as errand type tasks under location. So, you can more easily create that batch. We also have an energy tag. I know some people get a lot of energy, like creative mental energy in the morning. Some people are night owls. If you tag your tasks with energy levels, you might be able to schedule them more effectively based on your biological prime time or when you feel most creative. But it's PI that I actually think is the most important here. So PI stands for process and immersive. And these are two categories that you can apply to any task that you have to do. Uh this concept comes from a book called Work Clean. It's a book where the writer went and worked in a whole bunch of professional kitchens um and wrote a whole book about this ethos or philosophy called mison plas. Now mison plas and I'm probably butchering the pronunciation translates directly from French as putting in place. But really it's this whole ethos that's really popular in the world of professional cooking that has to do with the way you work, the way that you clean your workstation, you keep it organized throughout the day, the way that you prepare for your work. It's this whole entire productivity ethos that's uh really baked into professional cooking but that we can also apply to any other kinds of work that we're doing. The most important concept I got from that book is this idea of process and immersive type work. So immersive tasks are the tasks that you have to do uh fully like your full attention is needed. You have to completely commit to them. If I'm going to send this email, I need to write the email. I need to go ahead and send tests. I need to make sure that I spellch checked it. This is an immersive task. Process tasks are a little bit different. Process tasks are tasks that you kind of have to uh do a little bit of work to get the ball rolling, but then at least for a while, they take care of themselves. So, for a professional cooking world example, a process type task would be putting the pan on the oven and turning on the heat to let it heat up, right? And an immersive task in the same kitchen is chopping an onion. And once you understand the difference between these two types of tasks, you realize that the ordering matters so much. If you do your process task first, you can kind of get it in play and then you can switch your attention over to the immersive task and let the process task do its thing. Imagine the opposite. Imagine you chop the onion first and then you put the pan on the stove and you start waiting for it to heat up while you're twiddling your thumbs. If you had just switched the order, you could have that pan heating up while you are chopping the onion. two things are happening at once, but you're still doing the same amount of work. And if you work with other people, it's even more important. Say I needed to instead of writing this email myself, I needed to let my COO do it, but he doesn't have the login to Stripe and doesn't have to log into our email marketing system, but I also want to go fix that GitHub issue. If I choose to do the GitHub issue first, my COO is sitting there twiddling his thumbs. I'm paying his salary, and he's not sending our sales email. It would be so much better if I did the process task first

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

get him the information he needs so he can start his work and then I switch over to my immersive tasks and everything is happening in the background while I'm personally working on what I need to fully focus on. So if this is valuable to you, uh you can do something very similar and you can even build views for this. Like here we have our PI view and we've got all of our process tasks in this little toggle which we can close and open if we want. Same for immersive. And if we were to add something to our daily plan, like for instance, if I went over to my new tasks and just added this write daily planning blog post task to my plan, by default, it's going to be down here in no PI. Same with energy. energy. And I can drag them as I want. So I'm going to say this is a high energy task. Writing is high energy. And of course, it's going to be an immersive type task because I need to fully focus while I'm working on this otherwise it will not progress. Okay, so that is the first advanced addition that I made to this. And I think of the two, it's probably the most useful, which is nice because it is also the easiest one to add. But I will show you the other one, which is native time tracking here in Notion. And I'm working on a full tutorial for how to build this into Notion, which I think is going to be pretty useful once I get it done. Because a lot of notion time tracking systems are very simple. There is a start time and there is an end time for the task, and that's kind of all you have. you just subtract the start time from the end time and you get say 42 minutes. But with this system, you actually can have multiple work sessions for a single task. So for example, if for this writing daily planning blog post task, I hit start right now, it's going to move up into this active now section. And uh we can see that I've already worked on it for 17 minutes. So if we open this up as a full page, we can go into our view details and down here we can see we've tracked 17 minutes. We have a current session going, but there's a whole entire work sessions database. I can click into this. I'll make this a full page. And we can see that we're in a new database called work sessions. And there are actually two sessions that are associated with this particular task. This is basically how all time tracking apps that are like professional time tracking apps work by the way. Uh so all we have to do is add up the time that we have tracked for each one of these sessions and we're going to get a total amount of time we've spent on these tasks. And that also means that you can take breaks between sessions working on a task. Like if you wanted to do this daily planning blog post across four Pomodoro sessions, you could easily do that. And with this kind of a time tracking session, you would have an accurate count instead of just an arbitrary start and end time. Now, I think that this is really useful, but it's also easily the most complex part of the system to build. I am working on a video that will show you exactly how to build it from scratch, but it is the most complex compared to everything else I've shown you, which is actually kind of nice because while time tracking can be very useful, especially if you want to gauge your ability to predict how long things are going to take and hopefully improve it. While it's useful, I think everything else here that I've shown you today is even more useful. The context tags are very useful for batching tasks and helping to establish an order for the day, especially process and immersive tasks. I really encourage you to give those a go. But really, nothing is more important than the simple practice of again number one, not relying on due dates for tasks that are not actually due, not ending up with this mess. Uh but number two, each day coming in and starting from a blank space and then creating a deliberately selected plan of attack with a small number of tasks that you really think you can get done today and then again clearing that list at the end of the day so you can do it again tomorrow. And of course this is not unique to notion. This concept can be applied anywhere. Whatever task management app you're using for higher level planning, you can look at the tasks that you have coming up and write them down on a sticky note or in your code editor. And the reason I like doing it in Notion is I don't have to duplicate effort. say check off a task on my whiteboard where my daily plan is and then check the same task off over in my task manager here. I've just added another checkbox that filters those tasks from the main task manager down into this special view. And when I click it here, it's actually done. And I think that works really, really well. Now, I'm working on a video that will show you how to build this exact daily planner from scratch. That will be my next video. It's coming very soon. But if you want this done for you, this my day page comes inside of my ultimate brain template for Notion. This is an all-in-one system for managing your entire digital life inside of Notion. From task management to note-taking to project management. And honestly, instead of just showing a bunch of slick B-roll here, I'm going to show you my system. This is a single page where you have all of your tasks, notes. I have a free automation that I bundle with the onboarding materials and tutorial uh tutorials for uh doing voice notes like this and just taking notes on the go with your voice. We have project management. We have a whole tagging system based on Thiago Forte's PAR method. We have um areas, resources, and

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xj3_Nqj16U&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 21:00)

a special sort of way to organize your life called entities in here. So between the tagging system, the project system, the notes and tasks, you have a way to organize anything that comes into your life. And then of course with the my day page, you have a way to make a really tight daily plan that you can execute on. And right now we are running a Black Friday sale, so you can actually get 50% off of the original price. You can go down to thomasjfrank. com/brain in the description to claim that deal if you're here early enough. Otherwise, check the description. You may find a different coupon code depending on what time of year it is. And along with the template, you also get access to world-class tutorials for learning how to use it, both in video and written form. And you also get access to our customer support community where if you have questions on how to use the template, you get them answered every single time. So once again, thomasjfrank. com/brain. And right now you can use that code black Friday to get 50% off. If you do want to build this myday page for yourself, I'll have the video right there once it's done on how to build it from scratch. And since it relies on a task manager, right there you're going to find my video tutorial on how to build a full task manager from scratch. This is also a really great way to learn Notion in 2025 or beyond.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20784*