If you are like any of the busy girls in my girlboss gang, you have 10 million things to do in 1 week. I seriously love finding ways to manage all my tasks or to make accomplishing my to-do list easier.
As a Type A personality, there is no better high than getting shit done.
I’ve got some really good tricks for helping out with the struggle of getting everything checked off.
One: theSkimm
I spend a ton of time reading news articles on the weekend. During the week, I just don’t have time to troll twitter for news updates. I decided to try out theSkimm a while ago to see what the big deal was after my friend told me she loves it. If you spend the first 5 minutes after you wake up checking e-mail, you need theSkimm.
You get an e-mail every morning Monday-Friday with the top news stories summed up for you. My favorite part is it’s just that, a news summary. No opinion, no political posturing, just straight up news.
Some of the best advice I ever got at work was from a partner who told me to read the headlines every morning so you can talk to anyone. You’d be surprised how many weird random news stories I’ve actually had the opportunity to talk about with someone at work. People like hearing random stories, but they like competent humans who seem like they have a remote idea of what’s happening in the world even more.
Sign up here and give it a try. If you hate it (you won’t), just unsubscribe.
Two: If This, Then That App
Do you live your life through your phone? Then you need IFTTT on your phone. It’s an app that makes ‘recipes’ to help streamline different processes on your phone.
I use it for a few different primary purposes. First, I get a notification every morning at 6:30 with the weather for the day. A girl’s gotta know what to wear for the day.
I also use it to track different hashtags on Twitter. Anytime someone tweets using #astudyinchic, the tweet is saved to a list for me to go back and look at later.
There are thousands of recipes out there for the app. It can help you with anything on your phone. There are collections to streamline your social media and to help track your fitness and health across your fitness device and phone. I think this app can do literally anything. Get it in the App Store or read about it here.
photo cred: megbiram.com
Three: Meg Biram’s Get Shit Done Collection
The original queen of getting shit done, Meg Biram has a line of office supplies specifically to help you tackle your to-do list. One of the best ways to check of your list is to be motivated, for me, having cute office supplies is super motivating. Also, I truly appreciate her choice to create a line of supplies with shit in the title. Much to my Mom’s dismay, I’m probably a sailor at heart.
My favorite notepad is the GSD Master List. This is just an easy way to break out my to-do’s by specific task. I find this especially helpful at my day job since I manage a few different projects at once. Humans are by nature visual creatures so having this layout with my to-do’s makes it easy to determine what’s next and what’s a priority.
Get your shit done on megbiram.com.
Four: Todoist App
My other favorite must have app for getting shit done is Todoist. If you prefer electronic to-do lists over writing it all out, then you need this app.
When I was traveling non-stop for work, I would have died without my phone. I constantly was thinking of work tasks, new ideas, getting calls about new opportunities, and I didn’t always have a notepad. I lived for Todoist. I was able to keep track of everything I had to get done and anything new that came up all from the app. It also syncs with Google Calendar so you can schedule things to do. The best part, it works on your phone or computer, great for syncing across devices!
This is the perfect alternative or companion to your GSD notepads. Get Todoist in the app store or read more about it here.
Five: The Day Designer
I know, I just wrote a post talking about how much I love my Day Designer. But seriously you guys, this planner is so legit. If you want every single thing in your life in one place, Day Designer is the place for it.
There’s so much room in this agenda. Each day has a schedule by half hour for your meetings, a column for to-do’s, a column just for notes, and most importantly, a Top Three for the day.
The best part is that Target is currently selling a line of Day Designers for Blue Sky Planners. The Day Designer typically costs about $60. The Day Designer at Target is about $20. So you can get a trial run to see if you want to commit to a Day Designer next year.
Check out the Day Designer for Blue Sky options here and here.
What tips and tricks do you have for tackling your to-do list?
I downloaded theSkimm and I really like it. The articles are short and to the point.
Yay! I’m glad you like it. I love that it’s just a quick, to the point roundup of news. It’s exactly what I need in the morning.