Welcome to another edition of Digestable, the short, weekly email where I share information, ideas, and what’s new with me. This edition was delivered to subscribers on March 14th, 2021.
Here’s what’s up:
- ToDoist Task & Project Management App. Next up in the list of apps I can’t live without: ToDoist. I use this app to keep track of all the tasks and projects associated with my day job (leasing commercial real estate), chairing the Frontier Lodge Board of Directors, managing our rental properties, home maintenance, and my personal life. I share a “Rental Properties” project with Amanda and Ariel that allows us to share a task list and assign tasks to each other. I share a “Home” project with Amanda where we share home maintenance items, agenda items for our family meetings, and lists of gift ideas. I share my “Work” project with my boss so he can see what I’m up to. When Amanda and Ariel started using it for our rental properties, they soon adopted it to keep track of their school projects & assignments too. The free version is great for most situations, but if you use this link you and I will both get two months of Premium for free. You can get an in-depth look at how Brett McKay uses ToDoist to manage The Art of Manliness here.
- Email is Making Us Miserable and Here’s What to Do About It. Speaking of Brett McKay, in this podcast episode Brett interviews Cal Newport on his new book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Information Overload. Listed among the solutions is using a project management tool (such as ToDoist!) to communicate with your team. A key point for me was that, though you want your team members to accomplish their work autonomously, it is the leader’s job to provide structure for how the team communicates, and how they identify, assign, and review tasks.
- One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email. An unmanageable pile of unanswered email makes you feel like you are letting others down, and sometimes, you are. This comprehensive article by Tiago Forte is full of great strategies to get a better handle on your email-induced stress. Among them, is to think about email more like physical mail. Don’t spend your day in the post office, instead, to manage your email like your real mail: touch each email only once, and then put the information in its appropriate place. The 5 places he suggests:
1. A to-do list (like . . . ToDoist!)
2. A filing cabinet (dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, etc.)
3. An agenda (physical or digital calendar)
4. A magazine/newspaper rack (read-it-later apps like Instapaper, Pocket, etc.)
5. A trash can.
- Documentary I enjoyed: Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. Thank you to my daughter, Adia, for bringing this to my attention. We enjoyed watching this 2.5 hour documentary as a family. It is a fascinating look behind the curtain at how Billie, her brother, Finneas, and her parents, are trying to navigate the road from “normal” life to “teenage super-stardom” together, as a family. “The scene” with Justin Bieber is unforgettable. To my knowledge you’ll need an Apple TV+ account to view it, and heads up, these are mature themes so give me a shout if you are wondering about age-appropriateness.
- Quote I’m Pondering: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt.
Though I’ve always found this motto useful, I’ve found it especially effective for making decisions during COVID.
Thanks again for following along. If you know someone who would like to receive these types of updates from me, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two.
Should you come across anything noteworthy this week please send it my way!
Yours truly,
Jeff
Jeff Sutherland 