Do freaking important things

Welcome to Freaking Important!

The purpose of this blog is learn more about how to become and stay organized.

I am constantly deluged with work and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get it all done.  Starting another blog hardly seems like a good solution – I can barely maintain my two active blogs as they are.

But I see the demand – every day I get hits on http://www.accountinator.com looking for more information about how to use my favorite organizing program, OmniFocus for iPad.

And I have found blogging to be a great means to learn. Many write about blogging as an educational tool – for the readers.  But as a blogger, I’ve also found it to be phenomenal means for my own learning – that is, a means for the blog-writer to learn.  I need to learn how to be better organized, and, thus, a blog.

In addition, I have an immediate problem.  Last night I counted 125 items overdue on my to-do list.  Now many of them were there because I couldn’t even find the time to cross them off, even though I did them already.  Updating the list takes me down to 77. Now, if I were to do just seven tasks every day, I’d be finished in two weeks…  But that never works because then, in the first few days, I pick off the really easy tasks, leaving me with the rougher tasks later on, which never get done.

So I had a new idea: I’m going to do this exponentially. I’m going to cut my backlog down by 10% every day for the next two weeks.  After that, I want to slice off a single task a day, so that my backlog is gone by the end of May.  Here’s how I am visualizing it:

By the way, the inspiration for the name Freaking Important comes from Steven Covey, who writes about prioritizing the “important” over the “urgent.”  He writes that people tend to do the urgent tasks before they do the truly important ones, so much so that sometimes the important tasks never get done.  More on this in a future post.