A framework to Organize your Ideas and To-Do list

I have always been an freak about getting things organized. To the point I belong to the category of people who find there’s almost nothing in there life which is not worth organizing.

And among various things worth organizing, the list of tasks to be done is the most important. Because that holds the key to the quality of your future.

So here I am proposing a framework to organize that key.

Taking the case in point of an entrepreneur running a company, tasks can be organized in numerous ways, the 2 most popular ones being, organizing them by functions such as marketing, tech, fundraising, hiring etc.. or organizing them by people who shall be doing them.

Clearly, it is easy to debate on the above methodologies till the end of time, because which method suits you most depends only on how your brain is wired.

Is it wired by function first and people second or people first and function second. Because organization is done for indexing (which is done for easy searchbility), and how each person’s brain’s indexing works can be different. (Eg. mine is people first)

But, there’s a third framework, which i believe can reside on top of 
the above 2 categorizations and is extremely useful for those who are either very busy or very ambitious or both…        

Which is as follows:

Each task can be broken into the following 4 categories:

1. Urgent & Important
2. Urgent but not Important
3. Important but not Urgent
4. Neither Urgent nor important

To get into further depth, with my personal examples:

1. Urgent and Important: An ideal example being disbursing/transferring team salaries… These are the kind of tasks if not done on time, will lead to very dire consequences. So its best to finish them at the earliest, because they most often occupy a dedicated active?space in your head. You don’t need to organize them,?you may document them in a super-handy place like a notebook or a pinned whatsapp group, that too if you live on 0 memory (which in my opinion is pure bliss).
2. Urgent but not Important: Eg. attending a dinner-party/networking-event or wishing a teammate birthday. These are skippable time sensitive tasks that can only be done in a specific window, beyond that they loose meaning or the opportunity to complete them ceases to exist. It is best to add them to your calendar or note them in a copy/notebook with dates in it..
3. Important but not Urgent: Writing the quarterly investor update. These are things, which don’t loose value even if they get delayed by sometime, but have to be done. There may be dire consequences if they don’t get done, not when they are not done on time. These are the ones which deserve all your organizational skills and willpower. These also comprise of all the genius ideas that keep coming in your head all day. My recommendation is to use a 3 tier framework to keep them organized.?

3a. 1st you need a place to document them, its a flash of genius that hit you while you were s*#tting, so just document it in your whatsapp or todoist or wherever with an audio or a typed note.?

3b. Then organize them in your favorite task app either by function to which they belong or assign them to a person in your team with a future tentative date when you think it would be the right time to revisit it. This may be Asana, Basecamp, todoist etc…

3c. And now when the time has come to execute it, take it out from that Task app and either add it to your mental list of Urgent and Important or wherever you make your agenda of the day. ie. Now it goes into 1st category.

4. Neither Urgent nor important: Eg. posting content on Linkedin… Even if you don’t do it, nothing’s gonna fall apart… These are again the kind of tasks, you can avoid organizing or documenting anywhere… You do them if you feel like…

So, the three frameworks can actually be used in hierarchy to create an ideal searchable methodology. Eg. Wether something is urgent or important, then, to which function does it belong, and then who is responsible for doing it.

And this will ensure that, that flash of genius you had, is not only never lost but actually executed in its fullest sense.        

If you find it useful, please lemme know, it encourages me to share more of my observations/learnings/hacks whatever you may like to call them.

If you are also obsessed with keeping your tasks/ideas organized please share your best practices here or in DM or whatsapp them to me

If you think there’s fundamental loop-hole in this thought process please write it down here in comments so that everyone reading it knows about it also.