From listless to lists: apps to help you take control

Love lists?  Use them to manage your projects.  Add list items, reorder and reprioritise tasks, colour-code, tag, debate, add checklists and move them to other lists.  Group them on boards and link boards together, with entire boards full of sub-project lists. The possibilities are endless… a little like my ‘to do’ list.

If you find mind mapping, sketchnoting, and other visualisation techniques overly complex and unwieldy or you simply seek an online way to order and update your life, these list management apps might be some of your new best friends:

• Monday.com offers sophisticated project management tools and timelines for up to two people for free with a student account (and free trials if you need more people involved or more features). Allows you to manage multiple boards and organise projects with tasks and sub-tasks.
• Trello organises projects using digital post-its you can order, cluster, hold conversations about and stick images on. Simple and effective for straightforward projects, though starting to show its age.
• Workflowy offers flexible, taggable, collapsible lists to help record, organise and prioritise your thoughts, notes and tasks. The mobile app is simple and intuitive to use. You can just drag and drop items to create nested.
• Google Keep offers a simpler way of achieving many of the same things as Trello, including grouping of notes by tags, but unlike Trello, it does not support working with others and discussing or commenting on posts.

Or take your work/life management completely offline

Of course, you could take the low-fi option: pick up a notepad and create your own bespoke Bullet Journal. Just don’t be too precious about ‘sticking with the system’. Take whatever ideas and elements inspire you and create your own single source of truth about your life. There are lots of examples on the website where people have created very simple or very artistic bullet journals and found them to be helpful but the enduring message is that they are all successful and they are all so very different to one another!

You can even combine bullet journaling with sketchnote taking for a really creative approach to mindful task management! Truly, the possibilities once you begin to free your mind as to what project management looks like are endless.