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Jan 1 reminder:

If you use "The Cycle", today is the day you review your "long term goals" list. Cross out obsolete items or items that you now realize only seemed like a good idea at the time. Pick the 1-2 most important ones. Discuss them with your partner/wife/husband/spouse/family and set goals of the year.

For each goal, come up with 5-6 milestones that will get you to that goal. Milestones should be measurable. Sprinkle the milestones on the todo lists throughout the next couple of months. (In The Cycle, you have a different todo list for each day of the year; incomplete items slide to the next day.) For example, put one milestone on the todo list of each of Jan 1, Feb 1, March 1, and so on. At the start of each day allocate time for one of these big goals until it is complete.

This tip comes from Chapter 7 on "Life Goals" in Time Management for System Administrators. You might find it useful to re-read this chapter today. It is a short chapter so take some time to do that right now.

Also...

Today is also the first day of the month. The "monthly tasks" on your todo list should kick in today. Do any once-a-month routines (for example... call your mom!). Typically today you will get many emails reminding you which mailing lists you are on. Remember that it is better to unsubscribe than to delete without reading.

Have a happy new year! 2013 is going to be great!

Posted by Tom Limoncelli in Time Management

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7 Comments | Leave a comment

On that note, you do realise that lists.everythingsysadmin.com doesn't exist, even though I get monthly reminders and I can't unsubscribe?

Actually I didn't notice that! Thank you for pointing that out. It looks like I lost that DNS record when I changed DNS providers recently. I've fixed it (and added "Check lists.everythingsysadmin.com" to my post-upgrade checklist for future reference). Thanks!

Glad to help!

While I haven't yet embraced the Cycle for various reasons (probably excuses for procrastination on my part, I know), I reread TM4SA every couple of years and try to apply some more lessons in my life.

However I can't quite get used to a PAA (I've tried a couple of times and it just doesn't stick) and I'd love to see an update for the book that replaces 'PDA' with 'smartphone/tablet', or at least some blog posts that show how to adapt the Cycle with a few smartphone apps (I know you mentioned Pimlical's calendar being available for Android a while ago, I'm a bit reluctant to pay for it before reading some Cycle-aware positive reviews).

TL;DR: An update for 2013's technology, pretty please? :)

Which Smartphone do you use?

An Android phone. I tried various "todo" apps on the Market, but they fell quite short of the flow you demonstrated (and using a bunch of different ones that don't interact kinda beats the point, doesn't it?)

I've been heavily into org-mode (http://orgmode.org/) under emacs (I don't use emacs for anything else, btw) for two years now. It's flexible enough that you can completely implement The Cycle, and there's a pretty decent Android client for it (MobileOrg: author matburt).

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