In my previous post, also known as the Declaration of Love for Index Cards and the Like, about index cards, I mentioned my index card todo list. It’s actually a sort of system for getting things done.

While it didn’t seem to work out for me, it just might for you, or maybe you can pick something from it, I don’t know.

I’ll start with listing the basic idea, and then move on to the problems I had with it. So here goes.

The System

The idea was to make todo lists more visual than just a listing of stuff in your planning software of choice. I’ve found that I just don’t look at those, they don’t do it for me.

However, troves of index cards on my desk would be a lot harder to ignore.

The idea is simple. Write each task on an index card, and then grade it as follows:

• Urgent, as in got to be completed as soon as possible.
• Research, as in you got to read up, or perhaps get something from someone else, before you can complete it.
• Later, as in there’s really no rush completing this task.

Make a pile for each of these, and place the tasks labeled accordingly.

Now, each afternoon, just before you quit working, you go through these index cards and order them, with the most pressing ones on top of each pile. This is for two reasons. One, it makes sure that you really can’t miss the most urgent ones in each pile. And two, by doing this at the end of the day, you can leave work knowing that when you arrive next time, there’s no doubt what you’ll do, which should make you be more at ease if you’re inclined to be stressed out by your workload on your private time.

Finally, when you’re performing a task, just take the index card and put it in front of you while you work with it. Very visual, I know, but that was the whole idea.

When done with a task, write down the finishing date (and perhaps even time), an store the index card away for future reference.

Move on to the next one.

Why it didn’t Work for Me

So this didn’t work out that well for me. These are the problems I encountered.

• Clutter! Having too many index cards on your desk made the workplace a less harmonic place. Also, I have a cat, and they don’t really bother much if they spread your papers around when they honor you with their presence…
• Lack of overview. I found that I had too many tasks to balance at the same time, which meant that I needed to browse through the index cards several times a day.
• Long running gigs not suitable for todo lists. At the time I had two gigs running for a longer period of time, and none of them were very suitable to break up in tasks for todo lists. They were fluent, so they didn’t play well with a todo based concept at all.

Still, when writing all this down again, I feel that this could work for me. There are several advantages with it, and should I try it again for some reason (likely that my current system, which I’ll write about some other day, should suddenly fail me) I’d make sure to be better prepared. Like having boxes for the index cards, and things like that.

What do you think? Could the index card todo system work for you?